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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The God of His Fathers, by Jack London
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The God of His Fathers
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Release Date: March 18, 2005  [eBook #1655]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GOD OF HIS FATHERS***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1906 Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+THE GOD OF HIS FATHERS: TALES OF THE KLONDYKE
+
+
+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
+
+_These tales have appeared in "McClure's," "Ainslee's," "Outing," the
+"Overland Monthly," the "Wave," the "National," and the San Francisco
+"Examiner."  To the kindness of the various editors is due their
+reappearance in more permanent form_.
+
+TO THE DAUGHTERS OF THE WOLF WHO HAVE BRED AND SUCKLED A RACE OF MEN
+
+
+
+
+THE GOD OF HIS FATHERS
+
+
+I
+
+
+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 intake 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 sky-line, 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.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+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
+
+
+I
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+"_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 bearskin; 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 sailorman 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 wolf and the
+Silence; inside, death and the Silence.  You've never heard the Silence
+yet, Dick, and Gawd grant you don't ever have to hear it when you sit by
+the side of death.  Hear it?  Ay, till the breath whistles like a siren,
+and the heart booms, booms, booms, like the surf on the shore.
+
+"Siwash, Dick, but a woman.  White, Dick, white, clear through.  Towards
+the last she says, 'Keep my feather bed, Tommy, keep it always.'  And I
+agreed.  Then she opened her eyes, full with the pain.  'I've been a good
+woman to you, Tommy, and because of that I want you to promise--to
+promise'--the words seemed to stick in her throat--'that when you marry,
+the woman be white.  No more Siwash, Tommy.  I know.  Plenty white women
+down to Juneau now.  I know.  Your people call you "squaw-man," your
+women turn their heads to the one side on the street, and you do not go
+to their cabins like other men.  Why?  Your wife Siwash.  Is it not so?
+And this is not good.  Wherefore I die.  Promise me.  Kiss me in token of
+your promise.'
+
+"I kissed her, and she dozed off, whispering, 'It is good.'  At the end,
+that near gone my ear was at her lips, she roused for the last time.
+'Remember, Tommy; remember my feather bed.'  Then she died, in
+childbirth, up there on the Chilcat Station."
+
+The tent heeled over and half flattened before the gale.  Dick refilled
+his pipe, while Tommy drew the tea and set it aside against Molly's
+return.
+
+And she of the flashing eyes and Yankee blood?  Blinded, falling,
+crawling on hand and knee, the wind thrust back in her throat by the
+wind, she was heading for the tent.  On her shoulders a bulky pack caught
+the full fury of the storm.  She plucked feebly at the knotted flaps, but
+it was Tommy and Dick who cast them loose.  Then she set her soul for the
+last effort, staggered in, and fell exhausted on the floor.
+
+Tommy unbuckled the straps and took the pack from her.  As he lifted it
+there was a clanging of pots and pans.  Dick, pouring out a mug of
+whiskey, paused long enough to pass the wink across her body.  Tommy
+winked back.  His lips pursed the monosyllable, "clothes," but Dick shook
+his head reprovingly.  "Here, little woman," he said, after she had drunk
+the whiskey and straightened up a bit.
+
+"Here's some dry togs.  Climb into them.  We're going out to extra-peg
+the tent.  After that, give us the call, and we'll come in and have
+dinner.  Sing out when you're ready."
+
+"So help me, Dick, that's knocked the edge off her for the rest of this
+trip," Tommy spluttered as they crouched to the lee of the tent.
+
+"But it's the edge is her saving grace." Dick replied, ducking his head
+to a volley of sleet that drove around a corner of the canvas.  "The edge
+that you and I've got, Tommy, and the edge of our mothers before us."
+
+
+
+
+THE MAN WITH THE GASH
+
+
+Jacob Kent had suffered from cupidity all the days of his life.  This, in
+turn, had engendered a chronic distrustfulness, and his mind and
+character had become so warped that he was a very disagreeable man to
+deal with.  He was also a victim to somnambulic propensities, and very
+set in his ideas.  He had been a weaver of cloth from the cradle, until
+the fever of Klondike had entered his blood and torn him away from his
+loom.  His cabin stood midway between Sixty Mile Post and the Stuart
+River; and men who made it a custom to travel the trail to Dawson,
+likened him to a robber baron, perched in his fortress and exacting toll
+from the caravans that used his ill-kept roads.  Since a certain amount
+of history was required in the construction of this figure, the less
+cultured wayfarers from Stuart River were prone to describe him after a
+still more primordial fashion, in which a command of strong adjectives
+was to be chiefly noted.
+
+This cabin was not his, by the way, having been built several years
+previously by a couple of miners who had got out a raft of logs at that
+point for a grub-stake.  They had been most hospitable lads, and, after
+they abandoned it, travelers who knew the route made it an object to
+arrive there at nightfall.  It was very handy, saving them all the time
+and toil of pitching camp; and it was an unwritten rule that the last man
+left a neat pile of firewood for the next comer.  Rarely a night passed
+but from half a dozen to a score of men crowded into its shelter.  Jacob
+Kent noted these things, exercised squatter sovereignty, and moved in.
+Thenceforth, the weary travelers were mulcted a dollar per head for the
+privilege of sleeping on the floor, Jacob Kent weighing the dust and
+never failing to steal the down-weight.  Besides, he so contrived that
+his transient guests chopped his wood for him and carried his water.  This
+was rank piracy, but his victims were an easy-going breed, and while they
+detested him, they yet permitted him to flourish in his sins.
+
+One afternoon in April he sat by his door,--for all the world like a
+predatory spider,--marvelling at the heat of the returning sun, and
+keeping an eye on the trail for prospective flies.  The Yukon lay at his
+feet, a sea of ice, disappearing around two great bends to the north and
+south, and stretching an honest two miles from bank to bank.  Over its
+rough breast ran the sled-trail, a slender sunken line, eighteen inches
+wide and two thousand miles in length, with more curses distributed to
+the linear foot than any other road in or out of all Christendom.
+
+Jacob Kent was feeling particularly good that afternoon.  The record had
+been broken the previous night, and he had sold his hospitality to no
+less than twenty-eight visitors.  True, it had been quite uncomfortable,
+and four had snored beneath his bunk all night; but then it had added
+appreciable weight to the sack in which he kept his gold dust.  That
+sack, with its glittering yellow treasure, was at once the chief delight
+and the chief bane of his existence.  Heaven and hell lay within its
+slender mouth.  In the nature of things, there being no privacy to his
+one-roomed dwelling, he was tortured by a constant fear of theft.  It
+would be very easy for these bearded, desperate-looking strangers to make
+away with it.  Often he dreamed that such was the case, and awoke in the
+grip of nightmare.  A select number of these robbers haunted him through
+his dreams, and he came to know them quite well, especially the bronzed
+leader with the gash on his right cheek.  This fellow was the most
+persistent of the lot, and, because of him, he had, in his waking
+moments, constructed several score of hiding-places in and about the
+cabin.  After a concealment he would breathe freely again, perhaps for
+several nights, only to collar the Man with the Gash in the very act of
+unearthing the sack.  Then, on awakening in the midst of the usual
+struggle, he would at once get up and transfer the bag to a new and more
+ingenious crypt.  It was not that he was the direct victim of these
+phantasms; but he believed in omens and thought-transference, and he
+deemed these dream-robbers to be the astral projection of real personages
+who happened at those particular moments, no matter where they were in
+the flesh, to be harboring designs, in the spirit, upon his wealth.  So
+he continued to bleed the unfortunates who crossed his threshold, and at
+the same time to add to his trouble with every ounce that went into the
+sack.
+
+As he sat sunning himself, a thought came to Jacob Kent that brought him
+to his feet with a jerk.  The pleasures of life had culminated in the
+continual weighing and reweighing of his dust; but a shadow had been
+thrown upon this pleasant avocation, which he had hitherto failed to
+brush aside.  His gold-scales were quite small; in fact, their maximum
+was a pound and a half,--eighteen ounces,--while his hoard mounted up to
+something like three and a third times that.  He had never been able to
+weigh it all at one operation, and hence considered himself to have been
+shut out from a new and most edifying coign of contemplation.  Being
+denied this, half the pleasure of possession had been lost; nay, he felt
+that this miserable obstacle actually minimized the fact, as it did the
+strength, of possession.  It was the solution of this problem flashing
+across his mind that had just brought him to his feet.  He searched the
+trail carefully in either direction.  There was nothing in sight, so he
+went inside.
+
+In a few seconds he had the table cleared away and the scales set up.  On
+one side he placed the stamped disks to the equivalent of fifteen ounces,
+and balanced it with dust on the other.  Replacing the weights with dust,
+he then had thirty ounces precisely balanced.  These, in turn, he placed
+together on one side and again balanced with more dust.  By this time the
+gold was exhausted, and he was sweating liberally.  He trembled with
+ecstasy, ravished beyond measure.  Nevertheless he dusted the sack
+thoroughly, to the last least grain, till the balance was overcome and
+one side of the scales sank to the table.  Equilibrium, however, was
+restored by the addition of a pennyweight and five grains to the opposite
+side.  He stood, head thrown back, transfixed.  The sack was empty, but
+the potentiality of the scales had become immeasurable.  Upon them he
+could weigh any amount, from the tiniest grain to pounds upon pounds.
+Mammon laid hot fingers on his heart.  The sun swung on its westering way
+till it flashed through the open doorway, full upon the yellow-burdened
+scales.  The precious heaps, like the golden breasts of a bronze
+Cleopatra, flung back the light in a mellow glow.  Time and space were
+not.
+
+"Gawd blime me! but you 'ave the makin' of several quid there, 'aven't
+you?"
+
+Jacob Kent wheeled about, at the same time reaching for his
+double-barrelled shotgun, which stood handy.  But when his eyes lit on
+the intruder's face, he staggered back dizzily.  _It was the face of the
+Man with the Gash_!
+
+The man looked at him curiously.
+
+"Oh, that's all right," he said, waving his hand deprecatingly.  "You
+needn't think as I'll 'arm you or your blasted dust.
+
+"You're a rum 'un, you are," he added reflectively, as he watched the
+sweat pouring from off Kent's face and the quavering of his knees.
+
+"W'y don't you pipe up an' say somethin'?" he went on, as the other
+struggled for breath.  "Wot's gone wrong o' your gaff?  Anythink the
+matter?"
+
+"W--w--where'd you get it?" Kent at last managed to articulate, raising a
+shaking forefinger to the ghastly scar which seamed the other's cheek.
+
+"Shipmate stove me down with a marlin-spike from the main-royal.  An' now
+as you 'ave your figger'ead in trim, wot I want to know is, wot's it to
+you?  That's wot I want to know--wot's it to you?  Gawd blime me! do it
+'urt you?  Ain't it smug enough for the likes o' you?  That's wot I want
+to know!"
+
+"No, no," Kent answered, sinking upon a stool with a sickly grin.  "I was
+just wondering."
+
+"Did you ever see the like?" the other went on truculently.
+
+"No."
+
+"Ain't it a beute?"
+
+"Yes."  Kent nodded his head approvingly, intent on humoring this strange
+visitor, but wholly unprepared for the outburst which was to follow his
+effort to be agreeable.
+
+"You blasted, bloomin', burgoo-eatin' son-of-a-sea-swab!  Wot do you
+mean, a sayin' the most onsightly thing Gawd Almighty ever put on the
+face o' man is a beute?  Wot do you mean, you--"
+
+And thereat this fiery son of the sea broke off into a string of Oriental
+profanity, mingling gods and devils, lineages and men, metaphors and
+monsters, with so savage a virility that Jacob Kent was paralyzed.  He
+shrank back, his arms lifted as though to ward off physical violence.  So
+utterly unnerved was he that the other paused in the mid-swing of a
+gorgeous peroration and burst into thunderous laughter.
+
+"The sun's knocked the bottom out o' the trail," said the Man with the
+Gash, between departing paroxysms of mirth.  "An' I only 'ope as you'll
+appreciate the hoppertunity of consortin' with a man o' my mug.  Get
+steam up in that fire-box o' your'n.  I'm goin' to unrig the dogs an'
+grub 'em.  An' don't be shy o' the wood, my lad; there's plenty more
+where that come from, and it's you've got the time to sling an axe.  An'
+tote up a bucket o' water while you're about it.  Lively! or I'll run you
+down, so 'elp me!"
+
+Such a thing was unheard of.  Jacob Kent was making the fire, chopping
+wood, packing water--doing menial tasks for a guest!  When Jim Cardegee
+left Dawson, it was with his head filled with the iniquities of this
+roadside Shylock; and all along the trail his numerous victims had added
+to the sum of his crimes.  Now, Jim Cardegee, with the sailor's love for
+a sailor's joke, had determined, when he pulled into the cabin, to bring
+its inmate down a peg or so.  That he had succeeded beyond expectation he
+could not help but remark, though he was in the dark as to the part the
+gash on his cheek had played in it.  But while he could not understand,
+he saw the terror it created, and resolved to exploit it as remorselessly
+as would any modern trader a choice bit of merchandise.
+
+"Strike me blind, but you're a 'ustler," he said admiringly, his head
+cocked to one side, as his host bustled about.  "You never 'ort to 'ave
+gone Klondiking.  It's the keeper of a pub' you was laid out for.  An'
+it's often as I 'ave 'eard the lads up an' down the river speak o' you,
+but I 'adn't no idea you was so jolly nice."
+
+Jacob Kent experienced a tremendous yearning to try his shotgun on him,
+but the fascination of the gash was too potent.  This was the real Man
+with the Gash, the man who had so often robbed him in the spirit.  This,
+then, was the embodied entity of the being whose astral form had been
+projected into his dreams, the man who had so frequently harbored designs
+against his hoard; hence--there could be no other conclusion--this Man
+with the Gash had now come in the flesh to dispossess him.  And that
+gash!  He could no more keep his eyes from it than stop the beating of
+his heart.  Try as he would, they wandered back to that one point as
+inevitably as the needle to the pole.
+
+"Do it 'urt you?" Jim Cardegee thundered suddenly, looking up from the
+spreading of his blankets and encountering the rapt gaze of the other.
+"It strikes me as 'ow it 'ud be the proper thing for you to draw your
+jib, douse the glim, an' turn in, seein' as 'ow it worrits you.  Jes' lay
+to that, you swab, or so 'elp me I'll take a pull on your
+peak-purchases!"
+
+Kent was so nervous that it took three puffs to blow out the slush-lamp,
+and he crawled into his blankets without even removing his moccasins.  The
+sailor was soon snoring lustily from his hard bed on the floor, but Kent
+lay staring up into the blackness, one hand on the shotgun, resolved not
+to close his eyes the whole night.  He had not had an opportunity to
+secrete his five pounds of gold, and it lay in the ammunition box at the
+head of his bunk.  But, try as he would, he at last dozed off with the
+weight of his dust heavy on his soul.  Had he not inadvertently fallen
+asleep with his mind in such condition, the somnambulic demon would not
+have been invoked, nor would Jim Cardegee have gone mining next day with
+a dish-pan.
+
+The fire fought a losing battle, and at last died away, while the frost
+penetrated the mossy chinks between the logs and chilled the inner
+atmosphere.  The dogs outside ceased their howling, and, curled up in the
+snow, dreamed of salmon-stocked heavens where dog-drivers and kindred
+task-masters were not.  Within, the sailor lay like a log, while his host
+tossed restlessly about, the victim of strange fantasies.  As midnight
+drew near he suddenly threw off the blankets and got up.  It was
+remarkable that he could do what he then did without ever striking a
+light.  Perhaps it was because of the darkness that he kept his eyes
+shut, and perhaps it was for fear he would see the terrible gash on the
+cheek of his visitor; but, be this as it may, it is a fact that,
+unseeing, he opened his ammunition box, put a heavy charge into the
+muzzle of the shotgun without spilling a particle, rammed it down with
+double wads, and then put everything away and got back into bed.
+
+Just as daylight laid its steel-gray fingers on the parchment window,
+Jacob Kent awoke.  Turning on his elbow, he raised the lid and peered
+into the ammunition box.  Whatever he saw, or whatever he did not see,
+exercised a very peculiar effect upon him, considering his neurotic
+temperament.  He glanced at the sleeping man on the floor, let the lid
+down gently, and rolled over on his back.  It was an unwonted calm that
+rested on his face.  Not a muscle quivered.  There was not the least sign
+of excitement or perturbation.  He lay there a long while, thinking, and
+when he got up and began to move about, it was in a cool, collected
+manner, without noise and without hurry.
+
+It happened that a heavy wooden peg had been driven into the ridge-pole
+just above Jim Cardegee's head.  Jacob Kent, working softly, ran a piece
+of half-inch manila over it, bringing both ends to the ground.  One end
+he tied about his waist, and in the other he rove a running noose.  Then
+he cocked his shotgun and laid it within reach, by the side of numerous
+moose-hide thongs.  By an effort of will he bore the sight of the scar,
+slipped the noose over the sleeper's head, and drew it taut by throwing
+back on his weight, at the same time seizing the gun and bringing it to
+bear.
+
+Jim Cardegee awoke, choking, bewildered, staring down the twin wells of
+steel.
+
+"Where is it?" Kent asked, at the same time slacking on the rope.
+
+"You blasted--ugh--"
+
+Kent merely threw back his weight, shutting off the other's wind.
+
+"Bloomin'--Bur--ugh--"
+
+"Where is it?" Kent repeated.
+
+"Wot?"  Cardegee asked, as soon as he had caught his breath.
+
+"The gold-dust."
+
+"Wot gold-dust?" the perplexed sailor demanded.
+
+"You know well enough,--mine."
+
+"Ain't seen nothink of it.  Wot do ye take me for?  A safe-deposit?  Wot
+'ave I got to do with it, any'ow?"
+
+"Mebbe you know, and mebbe you don't know, but anyway, I'm going to stop
+your breath till you do know.  And if you lift a hand, I'll blow your
+head off!"
+
+"Vast heavin'!" Cardegee roared, as the rope tightened.
+
+Kent eased away a moment, and the sailor, wriggling his neck as though
+from the pressure, managed to loosen the noose a bit and work it up so
+the point of contact was just under the chin.
+
+"Well?" Kent questioned, expecting the disclosure.
+
+But Cardegee grinned.  "Go ahead with your 'angin', you bloomin' old pot-
+wolloper!"
+
+Then, as the sailor had anticipated, the tragedy became a farce.  Cardegee
+being the heavier of the two, Kent, throwing his body backward and down,
+could not lift him clear of the ground.  Strain and strive to the
+uttermost, the sailor's feet still stuck to the floor and sustained a
+part of his weight.  The remaining portion was supported by the point of
+contact just under his chin.  Failing to swing him clear, Kent clung on,
+resolved to slowly throttle him or force him to tell what he had done
+with the hoard.  But the Man with the Gash would not throttle.  Five,
+ten, fifteen minutes passed, and at the end of that time, in despair,
+Kent let his prisoner down.
+
+"Well," he remarked, wiping away the sweat, "if you won't hang you'll
+shoot.  Some men wasn't born to be hanged, anyway."
+
+"An' it's a pretty mess as you'll make o' this 'ere cabin floor."
+Cardegee was fighting for time.  "Now, look 'ere, I'll tell you wot we
+do; we'll lay our 'eads 'longside an' reason together.  You've lost some
+dust.  You say as 'ow I know, an' I say as 'ow I don't.  Let's get a
+hobservation an' shape a course--"
+
+"Vast heavin'!"  Kent dashed in, maliciously imitating the other's
+enunciation.  "I'm going to shape all the courses of this shebang, and
+you observe; and if you do anything more, I'll bore you as sure as
+Moses!"
+
+"For the sake of my mother--"
+
+"Whom God have mercy upon if she loves you.  Ah!  Would you?"  He
+frustrated a hostile move on the part of the other by pressing the cold
+muzzle against his forehead.  "Lay quiet, now!  If you lift as much as a
+hair, you'll get it."
+
+It was rather an awkward task, with the trigger of the gun always within
+pulling distance of the finger; but Kent was a weaver, and in a few
+minutes had the sailor tied hand and foot.  Then he dragged him without
+and laid him by the side of the cabin, where he could overlook the river
+and watch the sun climb to the meridian.
+
+"Now I'll give you till noon, and then--"
+
+"Wot?"
+
+"You'll be hitting the brimstone trail.  But if you speak up, I'll keep
+you till the next bunch of mounted police come by."
+
+"Well, Gawd blime me, if this ain't a go!  'Ere I be, innercent as a
+lamb, an' 'ere you be, lost all o' your top 'amper an' out o' your
+reckonin', run me foul an' goin' to rake me into 'ell-fire.  You bloomin'
+old pirut!  You--"
+
+Jim Cardegee loosed the strings of his profanity and fairly outdid
+himself.  Jacob Kent brought out a stool that he might enjoy it in
+comfort.  Having exhausted all the possible combinations of his
+vocabulary, the sailor quieted down to hard thinking, his eyes constantly
+gauging the progress of the sun, which tore up the eastern slope of the
+heavens with unseemly haste.  His dogs, surprised that they had not long
+since been put to harness, crowded around him.  His helplessness appealed
+to the brutes.  They felt that something was wrong, though they knew not
+what, and they crowded about, howling their mournful sympathy.
+
+"Chook!  Mush-on! you Siwashes!" he cried, attempting, in a vermicular
+way, to kick at them, and discovering himself to be tottering on the edge
+of a declivity.  As soon as the animals had scattered, he devoted himself
+to the significance of that declivity which he felt to be there but could
+not see.  Nor was he long in arriving at a correct conclusion.  In the
+nature of things, he figured, man is lazy.  He does no more than he has
+to.  When he builds a cabin he must put dirt on the roof.  From these
+premises it was logical that he should carry that dirt no further than
+was absolutely necessary.  Therefore, he lay upon the edge of the hole
+from which the dirt had been taken to roof Jacob Kent's cabin.  This
+knowledge, properly utilized, might prolong things, he thought; and he
+then turned his attention to the moose-hide thongs which bound him.  His
+hands were tied behind him, and pressing against the snow, they were wet
+with the contact.  This moistening of the raw-hide he knew would tend to
+make it stretch, and, without apparent effort, he endeavored to stretch
+it more and more.
+
+He watched the trail hungrily, and when in the direction of Sixty Mile a
+dark speck appeared for a moment against the white background of an ice-
+jam, he cast an anxious eye at the sun.  It had climbed nearly to the
+zenith.  Now and again he caught the black speck clearing the hills of
+ice and sinking into the intervening hollows; but he dared not permit
+himself more than the most cursory glances for fear of rousing his
+enemy's suspicion.  Once, when Jacob Kent rose to his feet and searched
+the trail with care, Cardegee was frightened, but the dog-sled had struck
+a piece of trail running parallel with a jam, and remained out of sight
+till the danger was past.
+
+"I'll see you 'ung for this," Cardegee threatened, attempting to draw the
+other's attention.  "An' you'll rot in 'ell, jes' you see if you don't.
+
+"I say," he cried, after another pause; "d'ye b'lieve in ghosts?"  Kent's
+sudden start made him sure of his ground, and he went on: "Now a ghost
+'as the right to 'aunt a man wot don't do wot he says; and you can't
+shuffle me off till eight bells--wot I mean is twelve o'clock--can you?
+'Cos if you do, it'll 'appen as 'ow I'll 'aunt you.  D'ye 'ear?  A
+minute, a second too quick, an' I'll 'aunt you, so 'elp me, I will!"
+
+Jacob Kent looked dubious, but declined to talk.
+
+"'Ow's your chronometer?  Wot's your longitude?  'Ow do you know as your
+time's correct?" Cardegee persisted, vainly hoping to beat his
+executioner out of a few minutes.  "Is it Barrack's time you 'ave, or is
+it the Company time?  'Cos if you do it before the stroke o' the bell,
+I'll not rest.  I give you fair warnin'.  I'll come back.  An' if you
+'aven't the time, 'ow will you know?  That's wot I want--'ow will you
+tell?"
+
+"I'll send you off all right," Kent replied.  "Got a sun-dial here."
+
+"No good.  Thirty-two degrees variation o' the needle."
+
+"Stakes are all set."
+
+"'Ow did you set 'em?  Compass?"
+
+"No; lined them up with the North Star."
+
+"Sure?"
+
+"Sure."
+
+Cardegee groaned, then stole a glance at the trail.  The sled was just
+clearing a rise, barely a mile away, and the dogs were in full lope,
+running lightly.
+
+"'Ow close is the shadows to the line?"
+
+Kent walked to the primitive timepiece and studied it.  "Three inches,"
+he announced, after a careful survey.
+
+"Say, jes' sing out 'eight bells' afore you pull the gun, will you?"
+
+Kent agreed, and they lapsed into silence.  The thongs about Cardegee's
+wrists were slowly stretching, and he had begun to work them over his
+hands.
+
+"Say, 'ow close is the shadows?"
+
+"One inch."
+
+The sailor wriggled slightly to assure himself that he would topple over
+at the right moment, and slipped the first turn over his hands.
+
+"'Ow close?"
+
+"Half an inch."  Just then Kent heard the jarring churn of the runners
+and turned his eyes to the trail.  The driver was lying flat on the sled
+and the dogs swinging down the straight stretch to the cabin.  Kent
+whirled back, bringing his rifle to shoulder.
+
+"It ain't eight bells yet!" Cardegee expostulated.  "I'll 'aunt you,
+sure!"
+
+Jacob Kent faltered.  He was standing by the sun-dial, perhaps ten paces
+from his victim.  The man on the sled must have seen that something
+unusual was taking place, for he had risen to his knees, his whip singing
+viciously among the dogs.
+
+The shadows swept into line.  Kent looked along the sights.
+
+"Make ready!" he commanded solemnly.  "Eight b--"
+
+But just a fraction of a second too soon, Cardegee rolled backward into
+the hole.  Kent held his fire and ran to the edge.  Bang!  The gun
+exploded full in the sailor's face as he rose to his feet.  But no smoke
+came from the muzzle; instead, a sheet of flame burst from the side of
+the barrel near its butt, and Jacob Kent went down.  The dogs dashed up
+the bank, dragging the sled over his body, and the driver sprang off as
+Jim Cardegee freed his hands and drew himself from the hole.
+
+"Jim!"  The new-comer recognized him.  "What's the matter?"
+
+"Wot's the matter?  Oh, nothink at all.  It jest 'appens as I do little
+things like this for my 'ealth.  Wot's the matter, you bloomin' idjit?
+Wot's the matter, eh?  Cast me loose or I'll show you wot!  'Urry up, or
+I'll 'olystone the decks with you!"
+
+"Huh!" he added, as the other went to work with his sheath-knife.  "Wot's
+the matter?  I want to know.  Jes' tell me that, will you, wot's the
+matter?  Hey?"
+
+Kent was quite dead when they rolled him over.  The gun, an
+old-fashioned, heavy-weighted muzzle-loader, lay near him.  Steel and
+wood had parted company.  Near the butt of the right-hand barrel, with
+lips pressed outward, gaped a fissure several inches in length.  The
+sailor picked it up, curiously.  A glittering stream of yellow dust ran
+out through the crack.  The facts of the case dawned upon Jim Cardegee.
+
+"Strike me standin'!" he roared; "'ere's a go!  'Ere's 'is bloomin' dust!
+Gawd blime me, an' you, too, Charley, if you don't run an' get the dish-
+pan!"
+
+
+
+
+JAN, THE UNREPENTANT
+
+
+   "For there's never a law of God or man
+   Runs north of Fifty-three."
+
+Jan rolled over, clawing and kicking.  He was fighting hand and foot now,
+and he fought grimly, silently.  Two of the three men who hung upon him,
+shouted directions to each other, and strove to curb the short, hairy
+devil who would not curb.  The third man howled.  His finger was between
+Jan's teeth.
+
+"Quit yer tantrums, Jan, an' ease up!" panted Red Bill, getting a
+strangle-hold on Jan's neck.  "Why on earth can't yeh hang decent and
+peaceable?"
+
+But Jan kept his grip on the third man's finger, and squirmed over the
+floor of the tent, into the pots and pans.
+
+"Youah no gentleman, suh," reproved Mr. Taylor, his body following his
+finger, and endeavoring to accommodate itself to every jerk of Jan's
+head.  "You hev killed Mistah Gordon, as brave and honorable a gentleman
+as ever hit the trail aftah the dogs.  Youah a murderah, suh, and without
+honah."
+
+"An' yer no comrade," broke in Red Bill.  "If you was, you'd hang 'thout
+rampin' around an' roarin'.  Come on, Jan, there's a good fellow.  Don't
+give us no more trouble.  Jes' quit, an' we'll hang yeh neat and handy,
+an' be done with it."
+
+"Steady, all!" Lawson, the sailorman, bawled.  "Jam his head into the
+bean pot and batten down."
+
+"But my fingah, suh," Mr. Taylor protested.
+
+"Leggo with y'r finger, then!  Always in the way!"
+
+"But I can't, Mistah Lawson.  It's in the critter's gullet, and nigh
+chewed off as 't is."
+
+"Stand by for stays!"  As Lawson gave the warning, Jan half lifted
+himself, and the struggling quartet floundered across the tent into a
+muddle of furs and blankets.  In its passage it cleared the body of a
+man, who lay motionless, bleeding from a bullet-wound in the neck.
+
+All this was because of the madness which had come upon Jan--the madness
+which comes upon a man who has stripped off the raw skin of earth and
+grovelled long in primal nakedness, and before whose eyes rises the fat
+vales of the homeland, and into whose nostrils steals the whiff of bay,
+and grass, and flower, and new-turned soil.  Through five frigid years
+Jan had sown the seed.  Stuart River, Forty Mile, Circle City, Koyokuk,
+Kotzebue, had marked his bleak and strenuous agriculture, and now it was
+Nome that bore the harvest,--not the Nome of golden beaches and ruby
+sands, but the Nome of '97, before Anvil City was located, or Eldorado
+District organized.  John Gordon was a Yankee, and should have known
+better.  But he passed the sharp word at a time when Jan's blood-shot
+eyes blazed and his teeth gritted in torment.  And because of this, there
+was a smell of saltpetre in the tent, and one lay quietly, while the
+other fought like a cornered rat, and refused to hang in the decent and
+peacable manner suggested by his comrades.
+
+"If you will allow me, Mistah Lawson, befoah we go further in this
+rumpus, I would say it wah a good idea to pry this hyer varmint's teeth
+apart.  Neither will he bite off, nor will he let go.  He has the wisdom
+of the sarpint, suh, the wisdom of the sarpint."
+
+"Lemme get the hatchet to him!" vociferated the sailor.  "Lemme get the
+hatchet!"  He shoved the steel edge close to Mr. Taylor's finger and used
+the man's teeth as a fulcrum.  Jan held on and breathed through his nose,
+snorting like a grampus.  "Steady, all!  Now she takes it!"
+
+"Thank you, suh; it is a powerful relief."  And Mr. Taylor proceeded to
+gather into his arms the victim's wildly waving legs.
+
+But Jan upreared in his Berserker rage; bleeding, frothing, cursing; five
+frozen years thawing into sudden hell.  They swayed backward and forward,
+panted, sweated, like some cyclopean, many-legged monster rising from the
+lower deeps.  The slush-lamp went over, drowned in its own fat, while the
+midday twilight scarce percolated through the dirty canvas of the tent.
+
+"For the love of Gawd, Jan, get yer senses back!" pleaded Red Bill.  "We
+ain't goin' to hurt yeh, 'r kill yeh, 'r anythin' of that sort.  Jes'
+want to hang yeh, that's all, an' you a-messin' round an' rampagin'
+somethin' terrible.  To think of travellin' trail together an' then bein'
+treated this-a way.  Wouldn't 'bleeved it of yeh, Jan!"
+
+"He's got too much steerage-way.  Grab holt his legs, Taylor, and heave'm
+over!"
+
+"Yes, suh, Mistah Lawson.  Do you press youah weight above, after I give
+the word."  The Kentuckian groped about him in the murky darkness.  "Now,
+suh, now is the accepted time!"
+
+There was a great surge, and a quarter of a ton of human flesh tottered
+and crashed to its fall against the side-wall.  Pegs drew and guy-ropes
+parted, and the tent, collapsing, wrapped the battle in its greasy folds.
+
+"Yer only makin' it harder fer yerself," Red Bill continued, at the same
+time driving both his thumbs into a hairy throat, the possessor of which
+he had pinned down.  "You've made nuisance enough a' ready, an' it'll
+take half the day to get things straightened when we've strung yeh up."
+
+"I'll thank you to leave go, suh," spluttered Mr. Taylor.
+
+Red Bill grunted and loosed his grip, and the twain crawled out into the
+open.  At the same instant Jan kicked clear of the sailor, and took to
+his heels across the snow.
+
+"Hi! you lazy devils!  Buck!  Bright!  Sic'm!  Pull 'm down!" sang out
+Lawson, lunging through the snow after the fleeing man.  Buck and Bright,
+followed by the rest of the dogs, outstripped him and rapidly overhauled
+the murderer.
+
+There was no reason that these men should do this; no reason for Jan to
+run away; no reason for them to attempt to prevent him.  On the one hand
+stretched the barren snow-land; on the other, the frozen sea.  With
+neither food nor shelter, he could not run far.  All they had to do was
+to wait till he wandered back to the tent, as he inevitably must, when
+the frost and hunger laid hold of him.  But these men did not stop to
+think.  There was a certain taint of madness running in the veins of all
+of them.  Besides, blood had been spilled, and upon them was the blood-
+lust, thick and hot.  "Vengeance is mine," saith the Lord, and He saith
+it in temperate climes where the warm sun steals away the energies of
+men.  But in the Northland they have discovered that prayer is only
+efficacious when backed by muscle, and they are accustomed to doing
+things for themselves.  God is everywhere, they have heard, but he flings
+a shadow over the land for half the year that they may not find him; so
+they grope in darkness, and it is not to be wondered that they often
+doubt, and deem the Decalogue out of gear.
+
+Jan ran blindly, reckoning not of the way of his feet, for he was
+mastered by the verb "to live."  To live!  To exist!  Buck flashed gray
+through the air, but missed.  The man struck madly at him, and stumbled.
+Then the white teeth of Bright closed on his mackinaw jacket, and he
+pitched into the snow.  _To live_!  _To exist_!  He fought wildly as
+ever, the centre of a tossing heap of men and dogs.  His left hand
+gripped a wolf-dog by the scruff of the back, while the arm was passed
+around the neck of Lawson.  Every struggle of the dog helped to throttle
+the hapless sailor.  Jan's right hand was buried deep in the curling
+tendrils of Red Bill's shaggy head, and beneath all, Mr. Taylor lay
+pinned and helpless.  It was a deadlock, for the strength of his madness
+was prodigious; but suddenly, without apparent reason, Jan loosed his
+various grips and rolled over quietly on his back.  His adversaries drew
+away a little, dubious and disconcerted.  Jan grinned viciously.
+
+"Mine friends," he said, still grinning, "you haf asked me to be
+politeful, und now I am politeful.  Vot piziness vood you do mit me?"
+
+"That's right, Jan.  Be ca'm," soothed Red Bill.  "I knowed you'd come to
+yer senses afore long.  Jes' be ca'm now, an' we'll do the trick with
+neatness and despatch."
+
+"Vot piziness?  Vot trick?"
+
+"The hangin'.  An' yeh oughter thank yer lucky stars for havin' a man
+what knows his business.  I've did it afore now, more'n once, down in the
+States, an' I can do it to a T."
+
+"Hang who?  Me?"
+
+"Yep."
+
+"Ha! ha!  Shust hear der man speak foolishness!  Gif me a hand, Bill, und
+I vill get up und be hung."  He crawled stiffly to his feet and looked
+about him.  "Herr Gott! listen to der man!  He vood hang me!  Ho! ho! ho!
+I tank not!  Yes, I tank not!"
+
+"And I tank yes, you swab," Lawson spoke up mockingly, at the same time
+cutting a sled-lashing and coiling it up with ominous care.  "Judge Lynch
+holds court this day."
+
+"Von liddle while."  Jan stepped back from the proffered noose.  "I haf
+somedings to ask und to make der great proposition.  Kentucky, you know
+about der Shudge Lynch?"
+
+"Yes, suh.  It is an institution of free men and of gentlemen, and it is
+an ole one and time-honored.  Corruption may wear the robe of magistracy,
+suh, but Judge Lynch can always be relied upon to give justice without
+court fees.  I repeat, suh, without court fees.  Law may be bought and
+sold, but in this enlightened land justice is free as the air we breathe,
+strong as the licker we drink, prompt as--"
+
+"Cut it short!  Find out what the beggar wants," interrupted Lawson,
+spoiling the peroration.
+
+"Vell, Kentucky, tell me dis: von man kill von odder man, Shudge Lynch
+hang dot man?"
+
+"If the evidence is strong enough--yes, suh."
+
+"An' the evidence in this here case is strong enough to hang a dozen men,
+Jan," broke in Red Bill.
+
+"Nefer you mind, Bill.  I talk mit you next.  Now von anodder ding I ask
+Kentucky.  If Shudge Lynch hang not der man, vot den?"
+
+"If Judge Lynch does not hang the man, then the man goes free, and his
+hands are washed clean of blood.  And further, suh, our great and
+glorious constitution has said, to wit: that no man may twice be placed
+in jeopardy of his life for one and the same crime, or words to that
+effect."
+
+"Unt dey can't shoot him, or hit him mit a club over der head alongside,
+or do nodings more mit him?"
+
+"No, suh."
+
+"Goot!  You hear vot Kentucky speaks, all you noddleheads?  Now I talk
+mit Bill.  You know der piziness, Bill, und you hang me up brown, eh?  Vot
+you say?"
+
+"'Betcher life, an', Jan, if yeh don't give no more trouble ye'll be
+almighty proud of the job.  I'm a connesoor."
+
+"You haf der great head, Bill, und know somedings or two.  Und you know
+two und one makes tree--ain't it?"
+
+Bill nodded.
+
+"Und when you haf two dings, you haf not tree dings--ain't it?  Now you
+follow mit me close und I show you.  It takes tree dings to hang.  First
+ding, you haf to haf der man.  Goot!  I am der man.  Second ding, you haf
+to haf der rope.  Lawson haf der rope.  Goot!  Und tird ding, you haf to
+haf someding to tie der rope to.  Sling your eyes over der landscape und
+find der tird ding to tie der rope to?  Eh?  Vot you say?"
+
+Mechanically they swept the ice and snow with their eyes.  It was a
+homogeneous scene, devoid of contrasts or bold contours, dreary,
+desolate, and monotonous,--the ice-packed sea, the slow slope of the
+beach, the background of low-lying hills, and over all thrown the endless
+mantle of snow.  "No trees, no bluffs, no cabins, no telegraph poles,
+nothin'," moaned Red Bill; "nothin' respectable enough nor big enough to
+swing the toes of a five-foot man clear o' the ground.  I give it up."  He
+looked yearningly at that portion of Jan's anatomy which joins the head
+and shoulders.  "Give it up," he repeated sadly to Lawson.  "Throw the
+rope down.  Gawd never intended this here country for livin' purposes,
+an' that's a cold frozen fact."
+
+Jan grinned triumphantly.  "I tank I go mit der tent und haf a smoke."
+
+"Ostensiblee y'r correct, Bill, me son," spoke up Lawson; "but y'r a
+dummy, and you can lay to that for another cold frozen fact.  Takes a sea
+farmer to learn you landsmen things.  Ever hear of a pair of shears?  Then
+clap y'r eyes to this."
+
+The sailor worked rapidly.  From the pile of dunnage where they had
+pulled up the boat the preceding fall, he unearthed a pair of long oars.
+These he lashed together, at nearly right angles, close to the ends of
+the blades.  Where the handles rested he kicked holes through the snow to
+the sand.  At the point of intersection he attached two guy-ropes, making
+the end of one fast to a cake of beach-ice.  The other guy he passed over
+to Red Bill.  "Here, me son, lay holt o' that and run it out."
+
+And to his horror, Jan saw his gallows rise in the air.  "No! no!" he
+cried, recoiling and putting up his fists.  "It is not goot!  I vill not
+hang!  Come, you noddleheads!  I vill lick you, all together, von after
+der odder!  I vill blay hell!  I vill do eferydings!  Und I vill die
+pefore I hang!"
+
+The sailor permitted the two other men to clinch with the mad creature.
+They rolled and tossed about furiously, tearing up snow and tundra, their
+fierce struggle writing a tragedy of human passion on the white sheet
+spread by nature.  And ever and anon a hand or foot of Jan emerged from
+the tangle, to be gripped by Lawson and lashed fast with rope-yarns.
+Pawing, clawing, blaspheming, he was conquered and bound, inch by inch,
+and drawn to where the inexorable shears lay like a pair of gigantic
+dividers on the snow.  Red Bill adjusted the noose, placing the hangman's
+knot properly under the left ear.  Mr. Taylor and Lawson tailed onto the
+running-guy, ready at the word to elevate the gallows.  Bill lingered,
+contemplating his work with artistic appreciation.
+
+"Herr Gott!  Vood you look at it!"
+
+The horror in Jan's voice caused the rest to desist.  The fallen tent had
+uprisen, and in the gathering twilight it flapped ghostly arms about and
+titubated toward them drunkenly.  But the next instant John Gordon found
+the opening and crawled forth.
+
+"What the flaming--!"  For the moment his voice died away in his throat
+as his eyes took in the tableau.  "Hold on!  I'm not dead!" he cried out,
+coming up to the group with stormy countenance.
+
+"Allow me, Mistah Gordon, to congratulate you upon youah escape," Mr.
+Taylor ventured.  "A close shave, suh, a powahful close shave."
+
+" Congratulate hell!  I might have been dead and rotten and no thanks to
+you, you--!"  And thereat John Gordon delivered himself of a vigorous
+flood of English, terse, intensive, denunciative, and composed solely of
+expletives and adjectives.
+
+"Simply creased me," he went on when he had eased himself sufficiently.
+"Ever crease cattle, Taylor?"
+
+"Yes, suh, many a time down in God's country."
+
+"Just so.  That's what happened to me.  Bullet just grazed the base of my
+skull at the top of the neck.  Stunned me but no harm done."  He turned
+to the bound man.  "Get up, Jan.  I'm going to lick you to a standstill
+or you're going to apologize.  The rest of you lads stand clear."
+
+"I tank not.  Shust tie me loose und you see," replied Jan, the
+Unrepentant, the devil within him still unconquered.  "Und after as I
+lick you, I take der rest of der noddleheads, von after der odder,
+altogedder!"
+
+
+
+
+GRIT OF WOMEN
+
+
+A wolfish head, wistful-eyed and frost-rimed, thrust aside the
+tent-flaps.
+
+"Hi!  Chook!  Siwash!  Chook, you limb of Satan!" chorused the protesting
+inmates.  Bettles rapped the dog sharply with a tin plate, and it
+withdrew hastily.  Louis Savoy refastened the flaps, kicked a frying-pan
+over against the bottom, and warmed his hands.  It was very cold without.
+Forty-eight hours gone, the spirit thermometer had burst at sixty-eight
+below, and since that time it had grown steadily and bitterly colder.
+There was no telling when the snap would end.  And it is poor policy,
+unless the gods will it, to venture far from a stove at such times, or to
+increase the quantity of cold atmosphere one must breathe.  Men sometimes
+do it, and sometimes they chill their lungs.  This leads up to a dry,
+hacking cough, noticeably irritable when bacon is being fried.  After
+that, somewhere along in the spring or summer, a hole is burned in the
+frozen muck.  Into this a man's carcass is dumped, covered over with
+moss, and left with the assurance that it will rise on the crack of Doom,
+wholly and frigidly intact.  For those of little faith, sceptical of
+material integration on that fateful day, no fitter country than the
+Klondike can be recommended to die in.  But it is not to be inferred from
+this that it is a fit country for living purposes.
+
+It was very cold without, but it was not over-warm within.  The only
+article which might be designated furniture was the stove, and for this
+the men were frank in displaying their preference.  Upon half of the
+floor pine boughs had been cast; above this were spread the
+sleeping-furs, beneath lay the winter's snowfall.  The remainder of the
+floor was moccasin-packed snow, littered with pots and pans and the
+general _impedimenta_ of an Arctic camp.  The stove was red and roaring
+hot, but only a bare three feet away lay a block of ice, as sharp-edged
+and dry as when first quarried from the creek bottom.  The pressure of
+the outside cold forced the inner heat upward.  Just above the stove,
+where the pipe penetrated the roof, was a tiny circle of dry canvas;
+next, with the pipe always as centre, a circle of steaming canvas; next a
+damp and moisture-exuding ring; and finally, the rest of the tent,
+sidewalls and top, coated with a half-inch of dry, white,
+crystal-encrusted frost.
+
+"_Oh_!  OH!  OH!"  A young fellow, lying asleep in the furs, bearded and
+wan and weary, raised a moan of pain, and without waking increased the
+pitch and intensity of his anguish.  His body half-lifted from the
+blankets, and quivered and shrank spasmodically, as though drawing away
+from a bed of nettles.
+
+"Roll'm over!" ordered Bettles.  "He's crampin'."
+
+And thereat, with pitiless good-will, he was pitched upon and rolled and
+thumped and pounded by half-a-dozen willing comrades.
+
+"Damn the trail," he muttered softly, as he threw off the robes and sat
+up.  "I've run across country, played quarter three seasons hand-running,
+and hardened myself in all manner of ways; and then I pilgrim it into
+this God-forsaken land and find myself an effeminate Athenian without the
+simplest rudiments of manhood!"  He hunched up to the fire and rolled a
+cigarette.  "Oh, I'm not whining.  I can take my medicine all right, all
+right; but I'm just decently ashamed of myself, that's all.  Here I am,
+on top of a dirty thirty miles, as knocked up and stiff and sore as a
+pink-tea degenerate after a five-mile walk on a country turn-pike.  Bah!
+It makes me sick!  Got a match?"  "Don't git the tantrums, youngster."
+Bettles passed over the required fire-stick and waxed patriarchal.  "Ye've
+gotter 'low some for the breakin'-in.  Sufferin' cracky! don't I
+recollect the first time I hit the trail!  Stiff?  I've seen the time
+it'd take me ten minutes to git my mouth from the water-hole an' come to
+my feet--every jint crackin' an' kickin' fit to kill.  Cramp?  In sech
+knots it'd take the camp half a day to untangle me.  You're all right,
+for a cub, any ye've the true sperrit.  Come this day year, you'll walk
+all us old bucks into the ground any time.  An' best in your favor, you
+hain't got that streak of fat in your make-up which has sent many a husky
+man to the bosom of Abraham afore his right and proper time."
+
+"Streak of fat?"
+
+"Yep.  Comes along of bulk.  'T ain't the big men as is the best when it
+comes to the trail."
+
+"Never heard of it."
+
+"Never heered of it, eh?  Well, it's a dead straight, open-an'-shut fact,
+an' no gittin' round.  Bulk's all well enough for a mighty big effort,
+but 'thout stayin' powers it ain't worth a continental whoop; an' stayin'
+powers an' bulk ain't runnin' mates.  Takes the small, wiry fellows when
+it comes to gittin' right down an' hangin' on like a lean-jowled dog to a
+bone.  Why, hell's fire, the big men they ain't in it!"
+
+"By gar!" broke in Louis Savoy, "dat is no, vot you call, josh!  I know
+one mans, so vaire beeg like ze buffalo.  Wit him, on ze Sulphur Creek
+stampede, go one small mans, Lon McFane.  You know dat Lon McFane, dat
+leetle Irisher wit ze red hair and ze grin.  An' dey walk an' walk an'
+walk, all ze day long an' ze night long.  And beeg mans, him become vaire
+tired, an' lay down mooch in ze snow.  And leetle mans keek beeg mans,
+an' him cry like, vot you call--ah! vot you call ze kid.  And leetle mans
+keek an' keek an' keek, an' bime by, long time, long way, keek beeg mans
+into my cabin.  Tree days 'fore him crawl out my blankets.  Nevaire I see
+beeg squaw like him.  No nevaire.  Him haf vot you call ze streak of fat.
+You bet."
+
+"But there was Axel Gunderson," Prince spoke up.  The great Scandinavian,
+with the tragic events which shadowed his passing, had made a deep mark
+on the mining engineer.  "He lies up there, somewhere."  He swept his
+hand in the vague direction of the mysterious east.
+
+"Biggest man that ever turned his heels to Salt Water, or run a moose
+down with sheer grit," supplemented Bettles; "but he's the prove-the-rule
+exception.  Look at his woman, Unga,--tip the scales at a hundred an'
+ten, clean meat an' nary ounce to spare.  She'd bank grit 'gainst his for
+all there was in him, an' see him, an' go him better if it was possible.
+Nothing over the earth, or in it, or under it, she wouldn't 'a' done."
+
+"But she loved him," objected the engineer.
+
+"'T ain't that.  It--"
+
+"Look you, brothers," broke in Sitka Charley from his seat on the grub-
+box.  "Ye have spoken of the streak of fat that runs in big men's
+muscles, of the grit of women and the love, and ye have spoken fair; but
+I have in mind things which happened when the land was young and the
+fires of men apart as the stars.  It was then I had concern with a big
+man, and a streak of fat, and a woman.  And the woman was small; but her
+heart was greater than the beef-heart of the man, and she had grit.  And
+we traveled a weary trail, even to the Salt Water, and the cold was
+bitter, the snow deep, the hunger great.  And the woman's love was a
+mighty love--no more can man say than this."
+
+He paused, and with the hatchet broke pieces of ice from the large chunk
+beside him.  These he threw into the gold pan on the stove, where the
+drinking-water thawed.  The men drew up closer, and he of the cramps
+sought greater comfort vainly for his stiffened body.
+
+"Brothers, my blood is red with Siwash, but my heart is white.  To the
+faults of my fathers I owe the one, to the virtues of my friends the
+other.  A great truth came to me when I was yet a boy.  I learned that to
+your kind and you was given the earth; that the Siwash could not
+withstand you, and like the caribou and the bear, must perish in the
+cold.  So I came into the warm and sat among you, by your fires, and
+behold, I became one of you, I have seen much in my time.  I have known
+strange things, and bucked big, on big trails, with men of many breeds.
+And because of these things, I measure deeds after your manner, and judge
+men, and think thoughts.  Wherefore, when I speak harshly of one of your
+own kind, I know you will not take it amiss; and when I speak high of one
+of my father's people, you will not take it upon you to say, 'Sitka
+Charley is Siwash, and there is a crooked light in his eyes and small
+honor to his tongue.'  Is it not so?"
+
+Deep down in throat, the circle vouchsafed its assent.
+
+"The woman was Passuk.  I got her in fair trade from her people, who were
+of the Coast and whose Chilcat totem stood at the head of a salt arm of
+the sea.  My heart did not go out to the woman, nor did I take stock of
+her looks.  For she scarce took her eyes from the ground, and she was
+timid and afraid, as girls will be when cast into a stranger's arms whom
+they have never seen before.  As I say, there was no place in my heart
+for her to creep, for I had a great journey in mind, and stood in need of
+one to feed my dogs and to lift a paddle with me through the long river
+days.  One blanket would cover the twain; so I chose Passuk.
+
+"Have I not said I was a servant to the Government?  If not, it is well
+that ye know.  So I was taken on a warship, sleds and dogs and evaporated
+foods, and with me came Passuk.  And we went north, to the winter ice-rim
+of Bering Sea, where we were landed,--myself, and Passuk, and the dogs.  I
+was also given moneys of the Government, for I was its servant, and
+charts of lands which the eyes of man had never dwelt upon, and messages.
+These messages were sealed, and protected shrewdly from the weather, and
+I was to deliver them to the whale-ships of the Arctic, ice-bound by the
+great Mackenzie.  Never was there so great a river, forgetting only our
+own Yukon, the Mother of all Rivers.
+
+"All of which is neither here nor there, for my story deals not with the
+whale-ships, nor the berg-bound winter I spent by the Mackenzie.
+Afterward, in the spring, when the days lengthened and there was a crust
+to the snow, we came south, Passuk and I, to the Country of the Yukon.  A
+weary journey, but the sun pointed out the way of our feet.  It was a
+naked land then, as I have said, and we worked up the current, with pole
+and paddle, till we came to Forty Mile.  Good it was to see white faces
+once again, so we put into the bank.  And that winter was a hard winter.
+The darkness and the cold drew down upon us, and with them the famine.  To
+each man the agent of the Company gave forty pounds of flour and twenty
+of bacon.  There were no beans.  And, the dogs howled always, and there
+were flat bellies and deep-lined faces, and strong men became weak, and
+weak men died.  There was also much scurvy.
+
+"Then came we together in the store one night, and the empty shelves made
+us feel our own emptiness the more.  We talked low, by the light of the
+fire, for the candles had been set aside for those who might yet gasp in
+the spring.  Discussion was held, and it was said that a man must go
+forth to the Salt Water and tell to the world our misery.  At this all
+eyes turned to me, for it was understood that I was a great traveler.  'It
+is seven hundred miles,' said I, 'to Haines Mission by the sea, and every
+inch of it snowshoe work.  Give me the pick of your dogs and the best of
+your grub, and I will go.  And with me shall go Passuk.'
+
+"To this they were agreed.  But there arose one, Long Jeff, a Yankee-man,
+big-boned and big-muscled.  Also his talk was big.  He, too, was a mighty
+traveler, he said, born to the snowshoe and bred up on buffalo milk.  He
+would go with me, in case I fell by the trail, that he might carry the
+word on to the Mission.  I was young, and I knew not Yankee-men.  How was
+I to know that big talk betokened the streak of fat, or that Yankee-men
+who did great things kept their teeth together?  So we took the pick of
+the dogs and the best of the grub, and struck the trail, we
+three,--Passuk, Long Jeff, and I.
+
+"Well, ye have broken virgin snow, labored at the gee-pole, and are not
+unused to the packed river-jams; so I will talk little of the toil, save
+that on some days we made ten miles, and on others thirty, but more often
+ten.  And the best of the grub was not good, while we went on stint from
+the start.  Likewise the pick of the dogs was poor, and we were hard put
+to keep them on their legs.  At the White River our three sleds became
+two sleds, and we had only come two hundred miles.  But we lost nothing;
+the dogs that left the traces went into the bellies of those that
+remained.
+
+"Not a greeting, not a curl of smoke, till we made Pelly.  Here I had
+counted on grub; and here I had counted on leaving Long Jeff, who was
+whining and trail-sore.  But the factor's lungs were wheezing, his eyes
+bright, his cache nigh empty; and he showed us the empty cache of the
+missionary, also his grave with the rocks piled high to keep off the
+dogs.  There was a bunch of Indians there, but babies and old men there
+were none, and it was clear that few would see the spring.
+
+"So we pulled on, light-stomached and heavy-hearted, with half a thousand
+miles of snow and silence between us and Haines Mission by the sea.  The
+darkness was at its worst, and at midday the sun could not clear the sky-
+line to the south.  But the ice-jams were smaller, the going better; so I
+pushed the dogs hard and traveled late and early.  As I said at Forty
+Mile, every inch of it was snow-shoe work.  And the shoes made great
+sores on our feet, which cracked and scabbed but would not heal.  And
+every day these sores grew more grievous, till in the morning, when we
+girded on the shoes, Long Jeff cried like a child.  I put him at the fore
+of the light sled to break trail, but he slipped off the shoes for
+comfort.  Because of this the trail was not packed, his moccasins made
+great holes, and into these holes the dogs wallowed.  The bones of the
+dogs were ready to break through their hides, and this was not good for
+them.  So I spoke hard words to the man, and he promised, and broke his
+word.  Then I beat him with the dog-whip, and after that the dogs
+wallowed no more.  He was a child, what of the pain and the streak of
+fat.
+
+"But Passuk.  While the man lay by the fire and wept, she cooked, and in
+the morning helped lash the sleds, and in the evening to unlash them.  And
+she saved the dogs.  Ever was she to the fore, lifting the webbed shoes
+and making the way easy.  Passuk--how shall I say?--I took it for granted
+that she should do these things, and thought no more about it.  For my
+mind was busy with other matters, and besides, I was young in years and
+knew little of woman.  It was only on looking back that I came to
+understand.
+
+"And the man became worthless.  The dogs had little strength in them, but
+he stole rides on the sled when he lagged behind.  Passuk said she would
+take the one sled, so the man had nothing to do.  In the morning I gave
+him his fair share of grub and started him on the trail alone.  Then the
+woman and I broke camp, packed the sleds, and harnessed the dogs.  By
+midday, when the sun mocked us, we would overtake the man, with the tears
+frozen on his cheeks, and pass him.  In the night we made camp, set aside
+his fair share of grub, and spread his furs.  Also we made a big fire,
+that he might see.  And hours afterward he would come limping in, and eat
+his grub with moans and groans, and sleep.  He was not sick, this man.  He
+was only trail-sore and tired, and weak with hunger.  But Passuk and I
+were trail-sore and tired, and weak with hunger; and we did all the work
+and he did none.  But he had the streak of fat of which our brother
+Bettles has spoken.  Further, we gave the man always his fair share of
+grub.
+
+"Then one day we met two ghosts journeying through the Silence.  They
+were a man and a boy, and they were white.  The ice had opened on Lake Le
+Barge, and through it had gone their main outfit.  One blanket each
+carried about his shoulders.  At night they built a fire and crouched
+over it till morning.  They had a little flour.  This they stirred in
+warm water and drank.  The man showed me eight cups of flour--all they
+had, and Pelly, stricken with famine, two hundred miles away.  They said,
+also, that there was an Indian behind; that they had whacked fair, but
+that he could not keep up.  I did not believe they had whacked fair, else
+would the Indian have kept up.  But I could give them no grub.  They
+strove to steal a dog--the fattest, which was very thin--but I shoved my
+pistol in their faces and told them begone.  And they went away, like
+drunken men, through the Silence toward Pelly.
+
+"I had three dogs now, and one sled, and the dogs were only bones and
+hair.  When there is little wood, the fire burns low and the cabin grows
+cold.  So with us.  With little grub the frost bites sharp, and our faces
+were black and frozen till our own mothers would not have known us.  And
+our feet were very sore.  In the morning, when I hit the trail, I sweated
+to keep down the cry when the pain of the snowshoes smote me.  Passuk
+never opened her lips, but stepped to the fore to break the way.  The man
+howled.
+
+"The Thirty Mile was swift, and the current ate away the ice from
+beneath, and there were many air-holes and cracks, and much open water.
+One day we came upon the man, resting, for he had gone ahead, as was his
+wont, in the morning.  But between us was open water.  This he had passed
+around by taking to the rim-ice where it was too narrow for a sled.  So
+we found an ice-bridge.  Passuk weighed little, and went first, with a
+long pole crosswise in her hands in chance she broke through.  But she
+was light, and her shoes large, and she passed over.  Then she called the
+dogs.  But they had neither poles nor shoes, and they broke through and
+were swept under by the water.  I held tight to the sled from behind,
+till the traces broke and the dogs went on down under the ice.  There was
+little meat to them, but I had counted on them for a week's grub, and
+they were gone.
+
+"The next morning I divided all the grub, which was little, into three
+portions.  And I told Long Jeff that he could keep up with us, or not, as
+he saw fit; for we were going to travel light and fast.  But he raised
+his voice and cried over his sore feet and his troubles, and said harsh
+things against comradeship.  Passuk's feet were sore, and my feet were
+sore--ay, sorer than his, for we had worked with the dogs; also, we
+looked to see.  Long Jeff swore he would die before he hit the trail
+again; so Passuk took a fur robe, and I a cooking pot and an axe, and we
+made ready to go.  But she looked on the man's portion, and said, 'It is
+wrong to waste good food on a baby.  He is better dead.'  I shook my head
+and said no--that a comrade once was a comrade always.  Then she spoke of
+the men of Forty Mile; that they were many men and good; and that they
+looked to me for grub in the spring.  But when I still said no, she
+snatched the pistol from my belt, quick, and as our brother Bettles has
+spoken, Long Jeff went to the bosom of Abraham before his time.  I chided
+Passuk for this; but she showed no sorrow, nor was she sorrowful.  And in
+my heart I knew she was right."
+
+Sitka Charley paused and threw pieces of ice into the gold pan on the
+stove.  The men were silent, and their backs chilled to the sobbing cries
+of the dogs as they gave tongue to their misery in the outer cold.
+
+"And day by day we passed in the snow the sleeping-places of the two
+ghosts--Passuk and I--and we knew we would be glad for such ere we made
+Salt Water.  Then we came to the Indian, like another ghost, with his
+face set toward Pelly.  They had not whacked up fair, the man and the
+boy, he said, and he had had no flour for three days.  Each night he
+boiled pieces of his moccasins in a cup, and ate them.  He did not have
+much moccasins left.  And he was a Coast Indian, and told us these things
+through Passuk, who talked his tongue.  He was a stranger in the Yukon,
+and he knew not the way, but his face was set to Pelly.  How far was it?
+Two sleeps? ten? a hundred--he did not know, but he was going to Pelly.
+It was too far to turn back; he could only keep on.
+
+"He did not ask for grub, for he could see we, too, were hard put.  Passuk
+looked at the man, and at me, as though she were of two minds, like a
+mother partridge whose young are in trouble.  So I turned to her and
+said, 'This man has been dealt unfair.  Shall I give him of our grub a
+portion?'  I saw her eyes light, as with quick pleasure; but she looked
+long at the man and at me, and her mouth drew close and hard, and she
+said, 'No.  The Salt Water is afar off, and Death lies in wait.  Better
+it is that he take this stranger man and let my man Charley pass.'  So
+the man went away in the Silence toward Pelly.  That night she wept.
+Never had I seen her weep before.  Nor was it the smoke of the fire, for
+the wood was dry wood.  So I marveled at her sorrow, and thought her
+woman's heart had grown soft at the darkness of the trail and the pain.
+
+"Life is a strange thing.  Much have I thought on it, and pondered long,
+yet daily the strangeness of it grows not less, but more.  Why this
+longing for Life?  It is a game which no man wins.  To live is to toil
+hard, and to suffer sore, till Old Age creeps heavily upon us and we
+throw down our hands on the cold ashes of dead fires.  It is hard to
+live.  In pain the babe sucks his first breath, in pain the old man gasps
+his last, and all his days are full of trouble and sorrow; yet he goes
+down to the open arms of Death, stumbling, falling, with head turned
+backward, fighting to the last.  And Death is kind.  It is only Life, and
+the things of Life that hurt.  Yet we love Life, and we hate Death.  It
+is very strange.
+
+"We spoke little, Passuk and I, in the days which came.  In the night we
+lay in the snow like dead people, and in the morning we went on our way,
+walking like dead people.  And all things were dead.  There were no
+ptarmigan, no squirrels, no snowshoe rabbits,--nothing.  The river made
+no sound beneath its white robes.  The sap was frozen in the forest.  And
+it became cold, as now; and in the night the stars drew near and large,
+and leaped and danced; and in the day the sun-dogs mocked us till we saw
+many suns, and all the air flashed and sparkled, and the snow was diamond
+dust.  And there was no heat, no sound, only the bitter cold and the
+Silence.  As I say, we walked like dead people, as in a dream, and we
+kept no count of time.  Only our faces were set to Salt Water, our souls
+strained for Salt Water, and our feet carried us toward Salt Water.  We
+camped by the Tahkeena, and knew it not.  Our eyes looked upon the White
+Horse, but we saw it not.  Our feet trod the portage of the Canyon, but
+they felt it not.  We felt nothing.  And we fell often by the way, but we
+fell, always, with our faces toward Salt Water.
+
+"Our last grub went, and we had shared fair, Passuk and I, but she fell
+more often, and at Caribou Crossing her strength left her.  And in the
+morning we lay beneath the one robe and did not take the trail.  It was
+in my mind to stay there and meet Death hand-in-hand with Passuk; for I
+had grown old, and had learned the love of woman.  Also, it was eighty
+miles to Haines Mission, and the great Chilcoot, far above the timber-
+line, reared his storm-swept head between.  But Passuk spoke to me, low,
+with my ear against her lips that I might hear.  And now, because she
+need not fear my anger, she spoke her heart, and told me of her love, and
+of many things which I did not understand.
+
+"And she said: 'You are my man, Charley, and I have been a good woman to
+you.  And in all the days I have made your fire, and cooked your food,
+and fed your dogs, and lifted paddle or broken trail, I have not
+complained.  Nor did I say that there was more warmth in the lodge of my
+father, or that there was more grub on the Chilcat.  When you have
+spoken, I have listened.  When you have ordered, I have obeyed.  Is it
+not so, Charley?'
+
+"And I said: 'Ay, it is so.'
+
+"And she said: 'When first you came to the Chilcat, nor looked upon me,
+but bought me as a man buys a dog, and took me away, my heart was hard
+against you and filled with bitterness and fear.  But that was long ago.
+For you were kind to me, Charley, as a good man is kind to his dog.  Your
+heart was cold, and there was no room for me; yet you dealt me fair and
+your ways were just.  And I was with you when you did bold deeds and led
+great ventures, and I measured you against the men of other breeds, and I
+saw you stood among them full of honor, and your word was wise, your
+tongue true.  And I grew proud of you, till it came that you filled all
+my heart, and all my thought was of you.  You were as the midsummer sun,
+when its golden trail runs in a circle and never leaves the sky.  And
+whatever way I cast my eyes I beheld the sun.  But your heart was ever
+cold, Charley, and there was no room.'
+
+"And I said: 'It is so.  It was cold, and there was no room.  But that is
+past.  Now my heart is like the snowfall in the spring, when the sun has
+come back.  There is a great thaw and a bending, a sound of running
+waters, and a budding and sprouting of green things.  And there is
+drumming of partridges, and songs of robins, and great music, for the
+winter is broken, Passuk, and I have learned the love of woman.'
+
+"She smiled and moved for me to draw her closer.  And she said, 'I am
+glad.'  After that she lay quiet for a long time, breathing softly, her
+head upon my breast.  Then she whispered: 'The trail ends here, and I am
+tired.  But first I would speak of other things.  In the long ago, when I
+was a girl on the Chilcat, I played alone among the skin bales of my
+father's lodge; for the men were away on the hunt, and the women and boys
+were dragging in the meat.  It was in the spring, and I was alone.  A
+great brown bear, just awake from his winter's sleep, hungry, his fur
+hanging to the bones in flaps of leanness, shoved his head within the
+lodge and said, "Oof!"  My brother came running back with the first sled
+of meat.  And he fought the bear with burning sticks from the fire, and
+the dogs in their harnesses, with the sled behind them, fell upon the
+bear.  There was a great battle and much noise.  They rolled in the fire,
+the skin bales were scattered, the lodge overthrown.  But in the end the
+bear lay dead, with the fingers of my brother in his mouth and the marks
+of his claws upon my brother's face.  Did you mark the Indian by the
+Pelly trail, his mitten which had no thumb, his hand which he warmed by
+our fire?  He was my brother.  And I said he should have no grub.  And he
+went away in the Silence without grub.'
+
+"This, my brothers, was the love of Passuk, who died in the snow, by the
+Caribou Crossing.  It was a mighty love, for she denied her brother for
+the man who led her away on weary trails to a bitter end.  And, further,
+such was this woman's love, she denied herself.  Ere her eyes closed for
+the last time she took my hand and slipped it under her squirrel-skin
+_parka_ to her waist.  I felt there a well-filled pouch, and learned the
+secret of her lost strength.  Day by day we had shared fair, to the last
+least bit; and day by day but half her share had she eaten.  The other
+half had gone into the well-filled pouch.
+
+"And she said: 'This is the end of the trail for Passuk; but your trail,
+Charley, leads on and on, over the great Chilcoot, down to Haines Mission
+and the sea.  And it leads on and on, by the light of many suns, over
+unknown lands and strange waters, and it is full of years and honors and
+great glories.  It leads you to the lodges of many women, and good women,
+but it will never lead you to a greater love than the love of Passuk.'
+
+"And I knew the woman spoke true.  But a madness came upon me, and I
+threw the well-filled pouch from me, and swore that my trail had reached
+an end, till her tired eyes grew soft with tears, and she said: 'Among
+men has Sitka Charley walked in honor, and ever has his word been true.
+Does he forget that honor now, and talk vain words by the Caribou
+Crossing?  Does he remember no more the men of Forty Mile, who gave him
+of their grub the best, of their dogs the pick?  Ever has Passuk been
+proud of her man.  Let him lift himself up, gird on his snowshoes, and
+begone, that she may still keep her pride.'
+
+"And when she grew cold in my arms I arose, and sought out the
+well-filled pouch, and girt on my snowshoes, and staggered along the
+trail; for there was a weakness in my knees, and my head was dizzy, and
+in my ears there was a roaring, and a flashing of fire upon my eyes.  The
+forgotten trails of boyhood came back to me.  I sat by the full pots of
+the _potlach_ feast, and raised my voice in song, and danced to the
+chanting of the men and maidens and the booming of the walrus drums.  And
+Passuk held my hand and walked by my side.  When I laid down to sleep,
+she waked me.  When I stumbled and fell, she raised me.  When I wandered
+in the deep snow, she led me back to the trail.  And in this wise, like a
+man bereft of reason, who sees strange visions and whose thoughts are
+light with wine, I came to Haines Mission by the sea."
+
+Sitka Charley threw back the tent-flaps.  It was midday.  To the south,
+just clearing the bleak Henderson Divide, poised the cold-disked sun.  On
+either hand the sun-dogs blazed.  The air was a gossamer of glittering
+frost.  In the foreground, beside the trail, a wolf-dog, bristling with
+frost, thrust a long snout heavenward and mourned.
+
+
+
+
+WHERE THE TRAIL FORKS
+
+
+   "Must I, then, must I, then, now leave this town--
+   And you, my love, stay here?"--_Schwabian Folk-song_.
+
+The singer, clean-faced and cheery-eyed, bent over and added water to a
+pot of simmering beans, and then, rising, a stick of firewood in hand,
+drove back the circling dogs from the grub-box and cooking-gear.  He was
+blue of eye, and his long hair was golden, and it was a pleasure to look
+upon his lusty freshness.  A new moon was thrusting a dim horn above the
+white line of close-packed snow-capped pines which ringed the camp and
+segregated it from all the world.  Overhead, so clear it was and cold,
+the stars danced with quick, pulsating movements.  To the southeast an
+evanescent greenish glow heralded the opening revels of the aurora
+borealis.  Two men, in the immediate foreground, lay upon the bearskin
+which was their bed.  Between the skin and naked snow was a six-inch
+layer of pine boughs.  The blankets were rolled back.  For shelter, there
+was a fly at their backs,--a sheet of canvas stretched between two trees
+and angling at forty-five degrees.  This caught the radiating heat from
+the fire and flung it down upon the skin.  Another man sat on a sled,
+drawn close to the blaze, mending moccasins.  To the right, a heap of
+frozen gravel and a rude windlass denoted where they toiled each day in
+dismal groping for the pay-streak.  To the left, four pairs of snowshoes
+stood erect, showing the mode of travel which obtained when the stamped
+snow of the camp was left behind.
+
+That Schwabian folk-song sounded strangely pathetic under the cold
+northern stars, and did not do the men good who lounged about the fire
+after the toil of the day.  It put a dull ache into their hearts, and a
+yearning which was akin to belly-hunger, and sent their souls questing
+southward across the divides to the sun-lands.
+
+"For the love of God, Sigmund, shut up!" expostulated one of the men.  His
+hands were clenched painfully, but he hid them from sight in the folds of
+the bearskin upon which he lay.
+
+"And what for, Dave Wertz?" Sigmund demanded.  "Why shall I not sing when
+the heart is glad?"
+
+"Because you've got no call to, that's why.  Look about you, man, and
+think of the grub we've been defiling our bodies with for the last
+twelvemonth, and the way we've lived and worked like beasts!"
+
+Thus abjured, Sigmund, the golden-haired, surveyed it all, and the frost-
+rimmed wolf-dogs and the vapor breaths of the men.  "And why shall not
+the heart be glad?" he laughed.  "It is good; it is all good.  As for the
+grub--"  He doubled up his arm and caressed the swelling biceps.  "And if
+we have lived and worked like beasts, have we not been paid like kings?
+Twenty dollars to the pan the streak is running, and we know it to be
+eight feet thick.  It is another Klondike--and we know it--Jim Hawes
+there, by your elbow, knows it and complains not.  And there's Hitchcock!
+He sews moccasins like an old woman, and waits against the time.  Only
+you can't wait and work until the wash-up in the spring.  Then we shall
+all be rich, rich as kings, only you cannot wait.  You want to go back to
+the States.  So do I, and I was born there, but I can wait, when each day
+the gold in the pan shows up yellow as butter in the churning.  But you
+want your good time, and, like a child, you cry for it now.  Bah!  Why
+shall I not sing:
+
+   "In a year, in a year, when the grapes are ripe,
+      I shall stay no more away.
+   Then if you still are true, my love,
+      It will be our wedding day.
+   In a year, in a year, when my time is past,
+      Then I'll live in your love for aye.
+   Then if you still are true, my love,
+      It will be our wedding day."
+
+The dogs, bristling and growling, drew in closer to the firelight.  There
+was a monotonous crunch-crunch of webbed shoes, and between each crunch
+the dragging forward of the heel of the shoe like the sound of sifting
+sugar.  Sigmund broke off from his song to hurl oaths and firewood at the
+animals.  Then the light was parted by a fur-clad figure, and an Indian
+girl slipped out of the webs, threw back the hood of her squirrel-skin
+_parka_, and stood in their midst.  Sigmund and the men on the bearskin
+greeted her as "Sipsu," with the customary "Hello," but Hitchcock made
+room on the sled that she might sit beside him.
+
+"And how goes it, Sipsu?" he asked, talking, after her fashion, in broken
+English and bastard Chinook.  "Is the hunger still mighty in the camp?
+and has the witch doctor yet found the cause wherefore game is scarce and
+no moose in the land?"
+
+"Yes; even so.  There is little game, and we prepare to eat the dogs.
+Also has the witch doctor found the cause of all this evil, and to-morrow
+will he make sacrifice and cleanse the camp."
+
+"And what does the sacrifice chance to be?--a new-born babe or some poor
+devil of a squaw, old and shaky, who is a care to the tribe and better
+out of the way?"
+
+"It chanced not that wise; for the need was great, and he chose none
+other than the chief's daughter; none other than I, Sipsu."
+
+"Hell!"  The word rose slowly to Hitchcock's lips, and brimmed over full
+and deep, in a way which bespoke wonder and consideration.
+
+"Wherefore we stand by a forking of the trail, you and I," she went on
+calmly, "and I have come that we may look once more upon each other, and
+once more only."
+
+She was born of primitive stock, and primitive had been her traditions
+and her days; so she regarded life stoically, and human sacrifice as part
+of the natural order.  The powers which ruled the day-light and the dark,
+the flood and the frost, the bursting of the bud and the withering of the
+leaf, were angry and in need of propitiation.  This they exacted in many
+ways,--death in the bad water, through the treacherous ice-crust, by the
+grip of the grizzly, or a wasting sickness which fell upon a man in his
+own lodge till he coughed, and the life of his lungs went out through his
+mouth and nostrils.  Likewise did the powers receive sacrifice.  It was
+all one.  And the witch doctor was versed in the thoughts of the powers
+and chose unerringly.  It was very natural.  Death came by many ways, yet
+was it all one after all,--a manifestation of the all-powerful and
+inscrutable.
+
+But Hitchcock came of a later world-breed.  His traditions were less
+concrete and without reverence, and he said, "Not so, Sipsu.  You are
+young, and yet in the full joy of life.  The witch doctor is a fool, and
+his choice is evil.  This thing shall not be."
+
+She smiled and answered, "Life is not kind, and for many reasons.  First,
+it made of us twain the one white and the other red, which is bad.  Then
+it crossed our trails, and now it parts them again; and we can do
+nothing.  Once before, when the gods were angry, did your brothers come
+to the camp.  They were three, big men and white, and they said the thing
+shall not be.  But they died quickly, and the thing was."
+
+Hitchcock nodded that he heard, half-turned, and lifted his voice.  "Look
+here, you fellows!  There's a lot of foolery going on over to the camp,
+and they're getting ready to murder Sipsu.  What d'ye say?"
+
+Wertz looked at Hawes, and Hawes looked back, but neither spoke.  Sigmund
+dropped his head, and petted the shepherd dog between his knees.  He had
+brought Shep in with him from the outside, and thought a great deal of
+the animal.  In fact, a certain girl, who was much in his thoughts, and
+whose picture in the little locket on his breast often inspired him to
+sing, had given him the dog and her blessing when they kissed good-by and
+he started on his Northland quest.
+
+"What d'ye say?" Hitchcock repeated.
+
+"Mebbe it's not so serious," Hawes answered with deliberation.  "Most
+likely it's only a girl's story."
+
+"That isn't the point!"  Hitchcock felt a hot flush of anger sweep over
+him at their evident reluctance.  "The question is, if it is so, are we
+going to stand it?  What are we going to do?"
+
+"I don't see any call to interfere," spoke up Wertz.  "If it is so, it is
+so, and that's all there is about it.  It's a way these people have of
+doing.  It's their religion, and it's no concern of ours.  Our concern is
+to get the dust and then get out of this God-forsaken land.  'T isn't fit
+for naught else but beasts?  And what are these black devils but beasts?
+Besides, it'd be damn poor policy."
+
+"That's what I say," chimed in Hawes.  "Here we are, four of us, three
+hundred miles from the Yukon or a white face.  And what can we do against
+half-a-hundred Indians?  If we quarrel with them, we have to vamose; if
+we fight, we are wiped out.  Further, we've struck pay, and, by God! I,
+for one, am going to stick by it!"
+
+"Ditto here," supplemented Wertz.
+
+Hitchcock turned impatiently to Sigmund, who was softly singing,--
+
+   "In a year, in a year, when the grapes are ripe,
+      I shall stay no more away."
+
+"Well, it's this way, Hitchcock," he finally said, "I'm in the same boat
+with the rest.  If three-score bucks have made up their mind to kill the
+girl, why, we can't help it.  One rush, and we'd be wiped off the
+landscape.  And what good'd that be?  They'd still have the girl.  There's
+no use in going against the customs of a people except you're in force."
+
+"But we are in force!" Hitchcock broke in.  "Four whites are a match for
+a hundred times as many reds.  And think of the girl!"
+
+Sigmund stroked the dog meditatively.  "But I do think of the girl.  And
+her eyes are blue like summer skies, and laughing like summer seas, and
+her hair is yellow, like mine, and braided in ropes the size of a big
+man's arms.  She's waiting for me, out there, in a better land.  And
+she's waited long, and now my pile's in sight I'm not going to throw it
+away."
+
+"And shamed I would be to look into the girl's blue eyes and remember the
+black ones of the girl whose blood was on my hands," Hitchcock sneered;
+for he was born to honor and championship, and to do the thing for the
+thing's sake, nor stop to weigh or measure.
+
+Sigmund shook his head.  "You can't make me mad, Hitchcock, nor do mad
+things because of your madness.  It's a cold business proposition and a
+question of facts.  I didn't come to this country for my health, and,
+further, it's impossible for us to raise a hand.  If it is so, it is too
+bad for the girl, that's all.  It's a way of her people, and it just
+happens we're on the spot this one time.  They've done the same for a
+thousand-thousand years, and they're going to do it now, and they'll go
+on doing it for all time to come.  Besides, they're not our kind.  Nor's
+the girl.  No, I take my stand with Wertz and Hawes, and--"
+
+But the dogs snarled and drew in, and he broke off, listening to the
+crunch-crunch of many snowshoes.  Indian after Indian stalked into the
+firelight, tall and grim, fur-clad and silent, their shadows dancing
+grotesquely on the snow.  One, the witch doctor, spoke gutturally to
+Sipsu.  His face was daubed with savage paint blotches, and over his
+shoulders was drawn a wolfskin, the gleaming teeth and cruel snout
+surmounting his head.  No other word was spoken.  The prospectors held
+the peace.  Sipsu arose and slipped into her snowshoes.
+
+"Good-by, O my man," she said to Hitchcock.  But the man who had sat
+beside her on the sled gave no sign, nor lifted his head as they filed
+away into the white forest.
+
+Unlike many men, his faculty of adaptation, while large, had never
+suggested the expediency of an alliance with the women of the Northland.
+His broad cosmopolitanism had never impelled toward covenanting in
+marriage with the daughters of the soil.  If it had, his philosophy of
+life would not have stood between.  But it simply had not.  Sipsu?  He
+had pleasured in camp-fire chats with her, not as a man who knew himself
+to be man and she woman, but as a man might with a child, and as a man of
+his make certainly would if for no other reason than to vary the tedium
+of a bleak existence.  That was all.  But there was a certain chivalric
+thrill of warm blood in him, despite his Yankee ancestry and New England
+upbringing, and he was so made that the commercial aspect of life often
+seemed meaningless and bore contradiction to his deeper impulses.
+
+So he sat silent, with head bowed forward, an organic force, greater than
+himself, as great as his race, at work within him.  Wertz and Hawes
+looked askance at him from time to time, a faint but perceptible
+trepidation in their manner.  Sigmund also felt this.  Hitchcock was
+strong, and his strength had been impressed upon them in the course of
+many an event in their precarious life.  So they stood in a certain
+definite awe and curiosity as to what his conduct would be when he moved
+to action.
+
+But his silence was long, and the fire nigh out, when Wertz stretched his
+arms and yawned, and thought he'd go to bed.  Then Hitchcock stood up his
+full height.
+
+"May God damn your souls to the deepest hells, you chicken-hearted
+cowards!  I'm done with you!"  He said it calmly enough, but his strength
+spoke in every syllable, and every intonation was advertisement of
+intention.  "Come on," he continued, "whack up, and in whatever way suits
+you best.  I own a quarter-interest in the claims; our contracts show
+that.  There're twenty-five or thirty ounces in the sack from the test
+pans.  Fetch out the scales.  We'll divide that now.  And you, Sigmund,
+measure me my quarter-share of the grub and set it apart.  Four of the
+dogs are mine, and I want four more.  I'll trade you my share in the camp
+outfit and mining-gear for the dogs.  And I'll throw in my six or seven
+ounces and the spare 45-90 with the ammunition.  What d'ye say?"
+
+The three men drew apart and conferred.  When they returned, Sigmund
+acted as spokesman.  "We'll whack up fair with you, Hitchcock.  In
+everything you'll get your quarter-share, neither more nor less; and you
+can take it or leave it.  But we want the dogs as bad as you do, so you
+get four, and that's all.  If you don't want to take your share of the
+outfit and gear, why, that's your lookout.  If you want it, you can have
+it; if you don't, leave it."
+
+"The letter of the law," Hitchcock sneered.  "But go ahead.  I'm willing.
+And hurry up.  I can't get out of this camp and away from its vermin any
+too quick."
+
+The division was effected without further comment.  He lashed his meagre
+belongings upon one of the sleds, rounded in his four dogs, and harnessed
+up.  His portion of outfit and gear he did not touch, though he threw
+onto the sled half a dozen dog harnesses, and challenged them with his
+eyes to interfere.  But they shrugged their shoulders and watched him
+disappear in the forest.
+
+* * * * *
+
+A man crawled upon his belly through the snow.  On every hand loomed the
+moose-hide lodges of the camp.  Here and there a miserable dog howled or
+snarled abuse upon his neighbor.  Once, one of them approached the
+creeping man, but the man became motionless.  The dog came closer and
+sniffed, and came yet closer, till its nose touched the strange object
+which had not been there when darkness fell.  Then Hitchcock, for it was
+Hitchcock, upreared suddenly, shooting an unmittened hand out to the
+brute's shaggy throat.  And the dog knew its death in that clutch, and
+when the man moved on, was left broken-necked under the stars.  In this
+manner Hitchcock made the chief's lodge.  For long he lay in the snow
+without, listening to the voices of the occupants and striving to locate
+Sipsu.  Evidently there were many in the tent, and from the sounds they
+were in high excitement.  At last he heard the girl's voice, and crawled
+around so that only the moose-hide divided them.  Then burrowing in the
+snow, he slowly wormed his head and shoulders underneath.  When the warm
+inner air smote his face, he stopped and waited, his legs and the greater
+part of his body still on the outside.  He could see nothing, nor did he
+dare lift his head.  On one side of him was a skin bale.  He could smell
+it, though he carefully felt to be certain.  On the other side his face
+barely touched a furry garment which he knew clothed a body.  This must
+be Sipsu.  Though he wished she would speak again, he resolved to risk
+it.
+
+He could hear the chief and the witch doctor talking high, and in a far
+corner some hungry child whimpering to sleep.  Squirming over on his
+side, he carefully raised his head, still just touching the furry
+garment.  He listened to the breathing.  It was a woman's breathing; he
+would chance it.
+
+He pressed against her side softly but firmly, and felt her start at the
+contact.  Again he waited, till a questioning hand slipped down upon his
+head and paused among the curls.  The next instant the hand turned his
+face gently upward, and he was gazing into Sipsu's eyes.
+
+She was quite collected.  Changing her position casually, she threw an
+elbow well over on the skin bale, rested her body upon it, and arranged
+her _parka_.  In this way he was completely concealed.  Then, and still
+most casually, she reclined across him, so that he could breathe between
+her arm and breast, and when she lowered her head her ear pressed lightly
+against his lips.
+
+"When the time suits, go thou," he whispered, "out of the lodge and
+across the snow, down the wind to the bunch of jackpine in the curve of
+the creek.  There wilt thou find my dogs and my sled, packed for the
+trail.  This night we go down to the Yukon; and since we go fast, lay
+thou hands upon what dogs come nigh thee, by the scruff of the neck, and
+drag them to the sled in the curve of the creek."
+
+Sipsu shook her head in dissent; but her eyes glistened with gladness,
+and she was proud that this man had shown toward her such favor.  But
+she, like the women of all her race, was born to obey the will masculine,
+and when Hitchcock repeated "Go!" he did it with authority, and though
+she made no answer he knew that his will was law.
+
+"And never mind harness for the dogs," he added, preparing to go.  "I
+shall wait.  But waste no time.  The day chaseth the night alway, nor
+does it linger for man's pleasure."
+
+Half an hour later, stamping his feet and swinging his arms by the sled,
+he saw her coming, a surly dog in either hand.  At the approach of these
+his own animals waxed truculent, and he favored them with the butt of his
+whip till they quieted.  He had approached the camp up the wind, and
+sound was the thing to be most feared in making his presence known.
+
+"Put them into the sled," he ordered when she had got the harness on the
+two dogs.  "I want my leaders to the fore."
+
+But when she had done this, the displaced animals pitched upon the
+aliens.  Though Hitchcock plunged among them with clubbed rifle, a riot
+of sound went up and across the sleeping camp.
+
+"Now we shall have dogs, and in plenty," he remarked grimly, slipping an
+axe from the sled lashings.  "Do thou harness whichever I fling thee, and
+betweenwhiles protect the team."
+
+He stepped a space in advance and waited between two pines.  The dogs of
+the camp were disturbing the night with their jangle, and he watched for
+their coming.  A dark spot, growing rapidly, took form upon the dim white
+expanse of snow.  It was a forerunner of the pack, leaping cleanly, and,
+after the wolf fashion, singing direction to its brothers.  Hitchcock
+stood in the shadow.  As it sprang past, he reached out, gripped its
+forelegs in mid-career, and sent it whirling earthward.  Then he struck
+it a well-judged blow beneath the ear, and flung it to Sipsu.  And while
+she clapped on the harness, he, with his axe, held the passage between
+the trees, till a shaggy flood of white teeth and glistening eyes surged
+and crested just beyond reach.  Sipsu worked rapidly.  When she had
+finished, he leaped forward, seized and stunned a second, and flung it to
+her.  This he repeated thrice again, and when the sled team stood
+snarling in a string of ten, he called, "Enough!"
+
+But at this instant a young buck, the forerunner of the tribe, and swift
+of limb, wading through the dogs and cuffing right and left, attempted
+the passage.  The butt of Hitchcock's rifle drove him to his knees,
+whence he toppled over sideways.  The witch doctor, running lustily, saw
+the blow fall.
+
+Hitchcock called to Sipsu to pull out.  At her shrill "Chook!" the
+maddened brutes shot straight ahead, and the sled, bounding mightily,
+just missed unseating her.  The powers were evidently angry with the
+witch doctor, for at this moment they plunged him upon the trail.  The
+lead-dog fouled his snowshoes and tripped him up, and the nine succeeding
+dogs trod him under foot and the sled bumped over him.  But he was quick
+to his feet, and the night might have turned out differently had not
+Sipsu struck backward with the long dog-whip and smitten him a blinding
+blow across the eyes.  Hitchcock, hurrying to overtake her, collided
+against him as he swayed with pain in the middle of the trail.  Thus it
+was, when this primitive theologian got back to the chief's lodge, that
+his wisdom had been increased in so far as concerns the efficacy of the
+white man's fist.  So, when he orated then and there in the council, he
+was wroth against all white men.
+
+* * * * *
+
+"Tumble out, you loafers!  Tumble out!  Grub'll be ready before you get
+into your footgear!"
+
+Dave Wertz threw off the bearskin, sat up, and yawned.
+
+Hawes stretched, discovered a lame muscle in his arm, and rubbed it
+sleepily.  "Wonder where Hitchcock bunked last night?" he queried,
+reaching for his moccasins.  They were stiff, and he walked gingerly in
+his socks to the fire to thaw them out.  "It's a blessing he's gone," he
+added, "though he was a mighty good worker."
+
+"Yep.  Too masterful.  That was his trouble.  Too bad for Sipsu.  Think
+he cared for her much?"
+
+"Don't think so.  Just principle.  That's all.  He thought it wasn't
+right--and, of course, it wasn't,--but that was no reason for us to
+interfere and get hustled over the divide before our time."
+
+"Principle is principle, and it's good in its place, but it's best left
+to home when you go to Alaska.  Eh?"  Wertz had joined his mate, and both
+were working pliability into their frozen moccasins.  "Think we ought to
+have taken a hand?"
+
+Sigmund shook his head.  He was very busy.  A scud of chocolate-colored
+foam was rising in the coffee-pot, and the bacon needed turning.  Also,
+he was thinking about the girl with laughing eyes like summer seas, and
+he was humming softly.
+
+His mates chuckled to each other and ceased talking.  Though it was past
+seven, daybreak was still three hours distant.  The aurora borealis had
+passed out of the sky, and the camp was an oasis of light in the midst of
+deep darkness.  And in this light the forms of the three men were sharply
+defined.  Emboldened by the silence, Sigmund raised his voice and opened
+the last stanza of the old song:-
+
+   "In a year, in a year, when the grapes are ripe--"
+
+Then the night was split with a rattling volley of rifle-shots.  Hawes
+sighed, made an effort to straighten himself, and collapsed.  Wertz went
+over on an elbow with drooping head.  He choked a little, and a dark
+stream flowed from his mouth.  And Sigmund, the Golden-Haired, his throat
+a-gurgle with the song, threw up his arms and pitched across the fire.
+
+* * * * *
+
+The witch doctor's eyes were well blackened, and his temper none of the
+best; for he quarrelled with the chief over the possession of Wertz's
+rifle, and took more than his share of the part-sack of beans.  Also he
+appropriated the bearskin, and caused grumbling among the tribesmen.  And
+finally, he tried to kill Sigmund's dog, which the girl had given him,
+but the dog ran away, while he fell into the shaft and dislocated his
+shoulder on the bucket.  When the camp was well looted they went back to
+their own lodges, and there was a great rejoicing among the women.
+Further, a band of moose strayed over the south divide and fell before
+the hunters, so the witch doctor attained yet greater honor, and the
+people whispered among themselves that he spoke in council with the gods.
+
+But later, when all were gone, the shepherd dog crept back to the
+deserted camp, and all the night long and a day it wailed the dead.  After
+that it disappeared, though the years were not many before the Indian
+hunters noted a change in the breed of timber wolves, and there were
+dashes of bright color and variegated markings such as no wolf bore
+before.
+
+
+
+
+A DAUGHTER OF THE AURORA
+
+
+"You--what you call--lazy mans, you lazy mans would desire me to haf for
+wife.  It is not good.  Nevaire, no, nevaire, will lazy mans my hoosband
+be."
+
+Thus Joy Molineau spoke her mind to Jack Harrington, even as she had
+spoken it, but more tritely and in his own tongue, to Louis Savoy the
+previous night.
+
+"Listen, Joy--"
+
+"No, no; why moos' I listen to lazy mans?  It is vaire bad, you hang
+rount, make visitation to my cabin, and do nothing.  How you get grub for
+the famine?  Why haf not you the dust?  Odder mans haf plentee."
+
+"But I work hard, Joy.  Never a day am I not on trail or up creek.  Even
+now have I just come off.  My dogs are yet tired.  Other men have luck
+and find plenty of gold; but I--I have no luck."
+
+"Ah!  But when this mans with the wife which is Indian, this mans
+McCormack, when him discovaire the Klondike, you go not.  Odder mans go;
+odder mans now rich."
+
+"You know I was prospecting over on the head-reaches of the Tanana,"
+Harrington protested, "and knew nothing of the Eldorado or Bonanza until
+it was too late."
+
+"That is deeferent; only you are--what you call way off."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Way off.  In the--yes--in the dark.  It is nevaire too late.  One vaire
+rich mine is there, on the creek which is Eldorado.  The mans drive the
+stake and him go 'way.  No odddr mans know what of him become.  The mans,
+him which drive the stake, is nevaire no more.  Sixty days no mans on
+that claim file the papaire.  Then odder mans, plentee odder mans--what
+you call--jump that claim.  Then they race, O so queek, like the wind, to
+file the papaire.  Him be vaire rich.  Him get grub for famine."
+
+Harrington hid the major portion of his interest.
+
+"When's the time up?" he asked.  "What claim is it?"
+
+"So I speak Louis Savoy last night," she continued, ignoring him.  "Him I
+think the winnaire."
+
+"Hang Louis Savoy!"
+
+"So Louis Savoy speak in my cabin last night.  Him say, 'Joy, I am strong
+mans.  I haf good dogs.  I haf long wind.  I will be winnaire.  Then you
+will haf me for hoosband?'  And I say to him, I say--"
+
+"What'd you say?"
+
+"I say, 'If Louis Savoy is winnaire, then will he haf me for wife.'"
+
+"And if he don't win?"
+
+"Then Louis Savoy, him will not be--what you call--the father of my
+children."
+
+"And if I win?"
+
+"You winnaire?  Ha! ha!  Nevaire!"
+
+Exasperating as it was, Joy Molineau's laughter was pretty to hear.
+Harrington did not mind it.  He had long since been broken in.  Besides,
+he was no exception.  She had forced all her lovers to suffer in kind.
+And very enticing she was just then, her lips parted, her color
+heightened by the sharp kiss of the frost, her eyes vibrant with the lure
+which is the greatest of all lures and which may be seen nowhere save in
+woman's eyes.  Her sled-dogs clustered about her in hirsute masses, and
+the leader, Wolf Fang, laid his long snout softly in her lap.
+
+"If I do win?" Harrington pressed.
+
+She looked from dog to lover and back again.
+
+"What you say, Wolf Fang?  If him strong mans and file the papaire, shall
+we his wife become?  Eh?  What you say?"
+
+Wolf Fang picked up his ears and growled at Harrington.
+
+"It is vaire cold," she suddenly added with feminine irrelevance, rising
+to her feet and straightening out the team.
+
+Her lover looked on stolidly.  She had kept him guessing from the first
+time they met, and patience had been joined unto his virtues.
+
+"Hi!  Wolf Fang!" she cried, springing upon the sled as it leaped into
+sudden motion.  "Ai!  Ya!  Mush-on!"
+
+From the corner of his eye Harrington watched her swinging down the trail
+to Forty Mile.  Where the road forked and crossed the river to Fort
+Cudahy, she halted the dogs and turned about.
+
+"O Mistaire Lazy Mans!" she called back.  "Wolf Fang, him say yes--if you
+winnaire!"
+
+* * * * *
+
+But somehow, as such things will, it leaked out, and all Forty Mile,
+which had hitherto speculated on Joy Molineau's choice between her two
+latest lovers, now hazarded bets and guesses as to which would win in the
+forthcoming race.  The camp divided itself into two factions, and every
+effort was put forth in order that their respective favorites might be
+the first in at the finish.  There was a scramble for the best dogs the
+country could afford, for dogs, and good ones, were essential, above all,
+to success.  And it meant much to the victor.  Besides the possession of
+a wife, the like of which had yet to be created, it stood for a mine
+worth a million at least.
+
+That fall, when news came down of McCormack's discovery on Bonanza, all
+the Lower Country, Circle City and Forty Mile included, had stampeded up
+the Yukon,--at least all save those who, like Jack Harrington and Louis
+Savoy, were away prospecting in the west.  Moose pastures and creeks were
+staked indiscriminately and promiscuously; and incidentally, one of the
+unlikeliest of creeks, Eldorado.  Olaf Nelson laid claim to five hundred
+of its linear feet, duly posted his notice, and as duly disappeared.  At
+that time the nearest recording office was in the police barracks at Fort
+Cudahy, just across the river from Forty Mile; but when it became bruited
+abroad that Eldorado Creek was a treasure-house, it was quickly
+discovered that Olaf Nelson had failed to make the down-Yukon trip to
+file upon his property.  Men cast hungry eyes upon the ownerless claim,
+where they knew a thousand-thousand dollars waited but shovel and sluice-
+box.  Yet they dared not touch it; for there was a law which permitted
+sixty days to lapse between the staking and the filing, during which time
+a claim was immune.  The whole country knew of Olaf Nelson's
+disappearance, and scores of men made preparation for the jumping and for
+the consequent race to Fort Cudahy.
+
+But competition at Forty Mile was limited.  With the camp devoting its
+energies to the equipping either of Jack Harrington or Louis Savoy, no
+man was unwise enough to enter the contest single-handed.  It was a
+stretch of a hundred miles to the Recorder's office, and it was planned
+that the two favorites should have four relays of dogs stationed along
+the trail.  Naturally, the last relay was to be the crucial one, and for
+these twenty-five miles their respective partisans strove to obtain the
+strongest possible animals.  So bitter did the factions wax, and so high
+did they bid, that dogs brought stiffer prices than ever before in the
+annals of the country.  And, as it chanced, this scramble for dogs turned
+the public eye still more searchingly upon Joy Molineau.  Not only was
+she the cause of it all, but she possessed the finest sled-dog from
+Chilkoot to Bering Sea.  As wheel or leader, Wolf Fang had no equal.  The
+man whose sled he led down the last stretch was bound to win.  There
+could be no doubt of it.  But the community had an innate sense of the
+fitness of things, and not once was Joy vexed by overtures for his use.
+And the factions drew consolation from the fact that if one man did not
+profit by him, neither should the other.
+
+However, since man, in the individual or in the aggregate, has been so
+fashioned that he goes through life blissfully obtuse to the deeper
+subtleties of his womankind, so the men of Forty Mile failed to divine
+the inner deviltry of Joy Molineau.  They confessed, afterward, that they
+had failed to appreciate this dark-eyed daughter of the aurora, whose
+father had traded furs in the country before ever they dreamed of
+invading it, and who had herself first opened eyes on the scintillant
+northern lights.  Nay, accident of birth had not rendered her less the
+woman, nor had it limited her woman's understanding of men.  They knew
+she played with them, but they did not know the wisdom of her play, its
+deepness and its deftness.  They failed to see more than the exposed
+card, so that to the very last Forty Mile was in a state of pleasant
+obfuscation, and it was not until she cast her final trump that it came
+to reckon up the score.
+
+Early in the week the camp turned out to start Jack Harrington and Louis
+Savoy on their way.  They had taken a shrewd margin of time, for it was
+their wish to arrive at Olaf Nelson's claim some days previous to the
+expiration of its immunity, that they might rest themselves, and their
+dogs be fresh for the first relay.  On the way up they found the men of
+Dawson already stationing spare dog teams along the trail, and it was
+manifest that little expense had been spared in view of the millions at
+stake.
+
+A couple of days after the departure of their champions, Forty Mile began
+sending up their relays,--first to the seventy-five station, then to the
+fifty, and last to the twenty-five.  The teams for the last stretch were
+magnificent, and so equally matched that the camp discussed their
+relative merits for a full hour at fifty below, before they were
+permitted to pull out.  At the last moment Joy Molineau dashed in among
+them on her sled.  She drew Lon McFane, who had charge of Harrington's
+team, to one side, and hardly had the first words left her lips when it
+was noticed that his lower jaw dropped with a celerity and emphasis
+suggestive of great things.  He unhitched Wolf Fang from her sled, put
+him at the head of Harrington's team, and mushed the string of animals
+into the Yukon trail.
+
+"Poor Louis Savoy!" men said; but Joy Molineau flashed her black eyes
+defiantly and drove back to her father's cabin.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Midnight drew near on Olaf Nelson's claim.  A few hundred fur-clad men
+had preferred sixty below and the jumping, to the inducements of warm
+cabins and comfortable bunks.  Several score of them had their notices
+prepared for posting and their dogs at hand.  A bunch of Captain
+Constantine's mounted police had been ordered on duty that fair play
+might rule.  The command had gone forth that no man should place a stake
+till the last second of the day had ticked itself into the past.  In the
+northland such commands are equal to Jehovah's in the matter of potency;
+the dum-dum as rapid and effective as the thunderbolt.  It was clear and
+cold.  The aurora borealis painted palpitating color revels on the sky.
+Rosy waves of cold brilliancy swept across the zenith, while great
+coruscating bars of greenish white blotted out the stars, or a Titan's
+hand reared mighty arches above the Pole.  And at this mighty display the
+wolf-dogs howled as had their ancestors of old time.
+
+A bearskin-coated policeman stepped prominently to the fore, watch in
+hand.  Men hurried among the dogs, rousing them to their feet, untangling
+their traces, straightening them out.  The entries came to the mark,
+firmly gripping stakes and notices.  They had gone over the boundaries of
+the claim so often that they could now have done it blindfolded.  The
+policeman raised his hand.  Casting off their superfluous furs and
+blankets, and with a final cinching of belts, they came to attention.
+
+"Time!"
+
+Sixty pairs of hands unmitted; as many pairs of moccasins gripped hard
+upon the snow.
+
+"Go!"
+
+They shot across the wide expanse, round the four sides, sticking notices
+at every corner, and down the middle where the two centre stakes were to
+be planted.  Then they sprang for the sleds on the frozen bed of the
+creek.  An anarchy of sound and motion broke out.  Sled collided with
+sled, and dog-team fastened upon dog-team with bristling manes and
+screaming fangs.  The narrow creek was glutted with the struggling mass.
+Lashes and butts of dog-whips were distributed impartially among men and
+brutes.  And to make it of greater moment, each participant had a bunch
+of comrades intent on breaking him out of jam.  But one by one, and by
+sheer strength, the sleds crept out and shot from sight in the darkness
+of the overhanging banks.
+
+Jack Harrington had anticipated this crush and waited by his sled until
+it untangled.  Louis Savoy, aware of his rival's greater wisdom in the
+matter of dog-driving, had followed his lead and also waited.  The rout
+had passed beyond earshot when they took the trail, and it was not till
+they had travelled the ten miles or so down to Bonanza that they came
+upon it, speeding along in single file, but well bunched.  There was
+little noise, and less chance of one passing another at that stage.  The
+sleds, from runner to runner, measured sixteen inches, the trail
+eighteen; but the trail, packed down fully a foot by the traffic, was
+like a gutter.  On either side spread the blanket of soft snow crystals.
+If a man turned into this in an endeavor to pass, his dogs would wallow
+perforce to their bellies and slow down to a snail's pace.  So the men
+lay close to their leaping sleds and waited.  No alteration in position
+occurred down the fifteen miles of Bonanza and Klondike to Dawson, where
+the Yukon was encountered.  Here the first relays waited.  But here,
+intent to kill their first teams, if necessary, Harrington and Savoy had
+had their fresh teams placed a couple of miles beyond those of the
+others.  In the confusion of changing sleds they passed full half the
+bunch.  Perhaps thirty men were still leading them when they shot on to
+the broad breast of the Yukon.  Here was the tug.  When the river froze
+in the fall, a mile of open water had been left between two mighty jams.
+This had but recently crusted, the current being swift, and now it was as
+level, hard, and slippery as a dance floor.  The instant they struck this
+glare ice Harrington came to his knees, holding precariously on with one
+hand, his whip singing fiercely among his dogs and fearsome abjurations
+hurtling about their ears.  The teams spread out on the smooth surface,
+each straining to the uttermost.  But few men in the North could lift
+their dogs as did Jack Harrington.  At once he began to pull ahead, and
+Louis Savoy, taking the pace, hung on desperately, his leaders running
+even with the tail of his rival's sled.
+
+Midway on the glassy stretch their relays shot out from the bank.  But
+Harrington did not slacken.  Watching his chance when the new sled swung
+in close, he leaped across, shouting as he did so and jumping up the pace
+of his fresh dogs.  The other driver fell off somehow.  Savoy did
+likewise with his relay, and the abandoned teams, swerving to right and
+left, collided with the others and piled the ice with confusion.
+Harrington cut out the pace; Savoy hung on.  As they neared the end of
+the glare ice, they swept abreast of the leading sled.  When they shot
+into the narrow trail between the soft snowbanks, they led the race; and
+Dawson, watching by the light of the aurora, swore that it was neatly
+done.
+
+When the frost grows lusty at sixty below, men cannot long remain without
+fire or excessive exercise, and live.  So Harrington and Savoy now fell
+to the ancient custom of "ride and run."  Leaping from their sleds, tow-
+thongs in hand, they ran behind till the blood resumed its wonted
+channels and expelled the frost, then back to the sleds till the heat
+again ebbed away.  Thus, riding and running, they covered the second and
+third relays.  Several times, on smooth ice, Savoy spurted his dogs, and
+as often failed to gain past.  Strung along for five miles in the rear,
+the remainder of the race strove to overtake them, but vainly, for to
+Louis Savoy alone was the glory given of keeping Jack Harrington's
+killing pace.
+
+As they swung into the seventy-five-mile station, Lon McFane dashed
+alongside; Wolf Fang in the lead caught Harrington's eye, and he knew
+that the race was his.  No team in the North could pass him on those last
+twenty-five miles.  And when Savoy saw Wolf Fang heading his rival's
+team, he knew that he was out of the running, and he cursed softly to
+himself, in the way woman is most frequently cursed.  But he still clung
+to the other's smoking trail, gambling on chance to the last.  And as
+they churned along, the day breaking in the southeast, they marvelled in
+joy and sorrow at that which Joy Molineau had done.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Forty Mile had early crawled out of its sleeping furs and congregated
+near the edge of the trail.  From this point it could view the up-Yukon
+course to its first bend several miles away.  Here it could also see
+across the river to the finish at Fort Cudahy, where the Gold Recorder
+nervously awaited.  Joy Molineau had taken her position several rods back
+from the trail, and under the circumstances, the rest of Forty Mile
+forbore interposing itself.  So the space was clear between her and the
+slender line of the course.  Fires had been built, and around these men
+wagered dust and dogs, the long odds on Wolf Fang.
+
+"Here they come!" shrilled an Indian boy from the top of a pine.
+
+Up the Yukon a black speck appeared against the snow, closely followed by
+a second.  As these grew larger, more black specks manifested themselves,
+but at a goodly distance to the rear.  Gradually they resolved themselves
+into dogs and sleds, and men lying flat upon them.  "Wolf Fang leads," a
+lieutenant of police whispered to Joy.  She smiled her interest back.
+
+"Ten to one on Harrington!" cried a Birch Creek King, dragging out his
+sack.
+
+"The Queen, her pay you not mooch?" queried Joy.
+
+The lieutenant shook his head.
+
+"You have some dust, ah, how mooch?" she continued.
+
+He exposed his sack.  She gauged it with a rapid eye.
+
+"Mebbe--say--two hundred, eh?  Good.  Now I give--what you call--the tip.
+Covaire the bet."  Joy smiled inscrutably.  The lieutenant pondered.  He
+glanced up the trail.  The two men had risen to their knees and were
+lashing their dogs furiously, Harrington in the lead.
+
+"Ten to one on Harrington!" bawled the Birch Creek King, flourishing his
+sack in the lieutenant's face.
+
+"Covaire the bet," Joy prompted.
+
+He obeyed, shrugging his shoulders in token that he yielded, not to the
+dictate of his reason, but to her charm.  Joy nodded to reassure him.
+
+All noise ceased.  Men paused in the placing of bets.
+
+Yawing and reeling and plunging, like luggers before the wind, the sleds
+swept wildly upon them.  Though he still kept his leader up to the tail
+of Harrington's sled, Louis Savoy's face was without hope.  Harrington's
+mouth was set.  He looked neither to the right nor to the left.  His dogs
+were leaping in perfect rhythm, firm-footed, close to the trail, and Wolf
+Fang, head low and unseeing, whining softly, was leading his comrades
+magnificently.
+
+Forty Mile stood breathless.  Not a sound, save the roar of the runners
+and the voice of the whips.
+
+Then the clear voice of Joy Molineau rose on the air.  "Ai!  Ya!  Wolf
+Fang!  Wolf Fang!"
+
+Wolf Fang heard.  He left the trail sharply, heading directly for his
+mistress.  The team dashed after him, and the sled poised an instant on a
+single runner, then shot Harrington into the snow.  Savoy was by like a
+flash.  Harrington pulled to his feet and watched him skimming across the
+river to the Gold Recorder's.  He could not help hearing what was said.
+
+"Ah, him do vaire well," Joy Molineau was explaining to the lieutenant.
+"Him--what you call--set the pace.  Yes, him set the pace vaire well."
+
+
+
+
+AT THE RAINBOW'S END
+
+
+I
+
+
+It was for two reasons that Montana Kid discarded his "chaps" and Mexican
+spurs, and shook the dust of the Idaho ranges from his feet.  In the
+first place, the encroachments of a steady, sober, and sternly moral
+civilization had destroyed the primeval status of the western cattle
+ranges, and refined society turned the cold eye of disfavor upon him and
+his ilk.  In the second place, in one of its cyclopean moments the race
+had arisen and shoved back its frontier several thousand miles.  Thus,
+with unconscious foresight, did mature society make room for its
+adolescent members.  True, the new territory was mostly barren; but its
+several hundred thousand square miles of frigidity at least gave
+breathing space to those who else would have suffocated at home.
+
+Montana Kid was such a one.  Heading for the sea-coast, with a haste
+several sheriff's posses might possibly have explained, and with more
+nerve than coin of the realm, he succeeded in shipping from a Puget Sound
+port, and managed to survive the contingent miseries of steerage
+sea-sickness and steerage grub.  He was rather sallow and drawn, but
+still his own indomitable self, when he landed on the Dyea beach one day
+in the spring of the year.  Between the cost of dogs, grub, and outfits,
+and the customs exactions of the two clashing governments, it speedily
+penetrated to his understanding that the Northland was anything save a
+poor man's Mecca.  So he cast about him in search of quick harvests.
+Between the beach and the passes were scattered many thousands of
+passionate pilgrims.  These pilgrims Montana Kid proceeded to farm.  At
+first he dealt faro in a pine-board gambling shack; but disagreeable
+necessity forced him to drop a sudden period into a man's life, and to
+move on up trail.  Then he effected a corner in horseshoe nails, and they
+circulated at par with legal tender, four to the dollar, till an
+unexpected consignment of a hundred barrels or so broke the market and
+forced him to disgorge his stock at a loss.  After that he located at
+Sheep Camp, organized the professional packers, and jumped the freight
+ten cents a pound in a single day.  In token of their gratitude, the
+packers patronized his faro and roulette layouts and were mulcted
+cheerfully of their earnings.  But his commercialism was of too lusty a
+growth to be long endured; so they rushed him one night, burned his
+shanty, divided the bank, and headed him up the trail with empty pockets.
+
+Ill-luck was his running mate.  He engaged with responsible parties to
+run whisky across the line by way of precarious and unknown trails, lost
+his Indian guides, and had the very first outfit confiscated by the
+Mounted Police.  Numerous other misfortunes tended to make him bitter of
+heart and wanton of action, and he celebrated his arrival at Lake Bennett
+by terrorizing the camp for twenty straight hours.  Then a miners'
+meeting took him in hand, and commanded him to make himself scarce.  He
+had a wholesome respect for such assemblages, and he obeyed in such haste
+that he inadvertently removed himself at the tail-end of another man's
+dog team.  This was equivalent to horse-stealing in a more mellow clime,
+so he hit only the high places across Bennett and down Tagish, and made
+his first camp a full hundred miles to the north.
+
+Now it happened that the break of spring was at hand, and many of the
+principal citizens of Dawson were travelling south on the last ice.  These
+he met and talked with, noted their names and possessions, and passed on.
+He had a good memory, also a fair imagination; nor was veracity one of
+his virtues.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Dawson, always eager for news, beheld Montana Kid's sled heading down the
+Yukon, and went out on the ice to meet him.  No, he hadn't any
+newspapers; didn't know whether Durrant was hanged yet, nor who had won
+the Thanksgiving game; hadn't heard whether the United States and Spain
+had gone to fighting; didn't know who Dreyfus was; but O'Brien?  Hadn't
+they heard?  O'Brien, why, he was drowned in the White Horse; Sitka
+Charley the only one of the party who escaped.  Joe Ladue?  Both legs
+frozen and amputated at the Five Fingers.  And Jack Dalton?  Blown up on
+the "Sea Lion" with all hands.  And Bettles?  Wrecked on the
+"Carthagina," in Seymour Narrows,--twenty survivors out of three hundred.
+And Swiftwater Bill?  Gone through the rotten ice of Lake LeBarge with
+six female members of the opera troupe he was convoying.  Governor Walsh?
+Lost with all hands and eight sleds on the Thirty Mile.  Devereaux?  Who
+was Devereaux?  Oh, the courier!  Shot by Indians on Lake Marsh.
+
+So it went.  The word was passed along.  Men shouldered in to ask after
+friends and partners, and in turn were shouldered out, too stunned for
+blasphemy.  By the time Montana Kid gained the bank he was surrounded by
+several hundred fur-clad miners.  When he passed the Barracks he was the
+centre of a procession.  At the Opera House he was the nucleus of an
+excited mob, each member struggling for a chance to ask after some absent
+comrade.  On every side he was being invited to drink.  Never before had
+the Klondike thus opened its arms to a che-cha-qua.  All Dawson was
+humming.  Such a series of catastrophes had never occurred in its
+history.  Every man of note who had gone south in the spring had been
+wiped out.  The cabins vomited forth their occupants.  Wild-eyed men
+hurried down from the creeks and gulches to seek out this man who had
+told a tale of such disaster.  The Russian half-breed wife of Bettles
+sought the fireplace, inconsolable, and rocked back and forth, and ever
+and anon flung white wood-ashes upon her raven hair.  The flag at the
+Barracks flopped dismally at half-mast.  Dawson mourned its dead.
+
+Why Montana Kid did this thing no man may know.  Nor beyond the fact that
+the truth was not in him, can explanation be hazarded.  But for five
+whole days he plunged the land in wailing and sorrow, and for five whole
+days he was the only man in the Klondike.  The country gave him its best
+of bed and board.  The saloons granted him the freedom of their bars.  Men
+sought him continuously.  The high officials bowed down to him for
+further information, and he was feasted at the Barracks by Constantine
+and his brother officers.  And then, one day, Devereaux, the government
+courier, halted his tired dogs before the gold commissioner's office.
+Dead?  Who said so?  Give him a moose steak and he'd show them how dead
+he was.  Why, Governor Walsh was in camp on the Little Salmon, and
+O'Brien coming in on the first water.  Dead?  Give him a moose steak and
+he'd show them.
+
+And forthwith Dawson hummed.  The Barracks' flag rose to the masthead,
+and Bettles' wife washed herself and put on clean raiment.  The community
+subtly signified its desire that Montana Kid obliterate himself from the
+landscape.  And Montana Kid obliterated; as usual, at the tail-end of
+some one else's dog team.  Dawson rejoiced when he headed down the Yukon,
+and wished him godspeed to the ultimate destination of the case-hardened
+sinner.  After that the owner of the dogs bestirred himself, made
+complaint to Constantine, and from him received the loan of a policeman.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+With Circle City in prospect and the last ice crumbling under his
+runners, Montana Kid took advantage of the lengthening days and travelled
+his dogs late and early.  Further, he had but little doubt that the owner
+of the dogs in question had taken his trail, and he wished to make
+American territory before the river broke.  But by the afternoon of the
+third day it became evident that he had lost in his race with spring.  The
+Yukon was growling and straining at its fetters.  Long detours became
+necessary, for the trail had begun to fall through into the swift current
+beneath, while the ice, in constant unrest, was thundering apart in great
+gaping fissures.  Through these and through countless airholes, the water
+began to sweep across the surface of the ice, and by the time he pulled
+into a woodchopper's cabin on the point of an island, the dogs were being
+rushed off their feet and were swimming more often than not.  He was
+greeted sourly by the two residents, but he unharnessed and proceeded to
+cook up.
+
+Donald and Davy were fair specimens of frontier inefficients.  Canadian-
+born, city-bred Scots, in a foolish moment they had resigned their
+counting-house desks, drawn upon their savings, and gone Klondiking.  And
+now they were feeling the rough edge of the country.  Grubless,
+spiritless, with a lust for home in their hearts, they had been staked by
+the P. C. Company to cut wood for its steamers, with the promise at the
+end of a passage home.  Disregarding the possibilities of the ice-run,
+they had fittingly demonstrated their inefficiency by their choice of the
+island on which they located.  Montana Kid, though possessing little
+knowledge of the break-up of a great river, looked about him dubiously,
+and cast yearning glances at the distant bank where the towering bluffs
+promised immunity from all the ice of the Northland.
+
+After feeding himself and dogs, he lighted his pipe and strolled out to
+get a better idea of the situation.  The island, like all its river
+brethren, stood higher at the upper end, and it was here that Donald and
+Davy had built their cabin and piled many cords of wood.  The far shore
+was a full mile away, while between the island and the near shore lay a
+back-channel perhaps a hundred yards across.  At first sight of this,
+Montana Kid was tempted to take his dogs and escape to the mainland, but
+on closer inspection he discovered a rapid current flooding on top.
+Below, the river twisted sharply to the west, and in this turn its breast
+was studded by a maze of tiny islands.
+
+"That's where she'll jam," he remarked to himself.
+
+Half a dozen sleds, evidently bound up-stream to Dawson, were splashing
+through the chill water to the tail of the island.  Travel on the river
+was passing from the precarious to the impossible, and it was nip and
+tuck with them till they gained the island and came up the path of the
+wood-choppers toward the cabin.  One of them, snow-blind, towed
+helplessly at the rear of a sled.  Husky young fellows they were, rough-
+garmented and trail-worn, yet Montana Kid had met the breed before and
+knew at once that it was not his kind.
+
+"Hello!  How's things up Dawson-way?" queried the foremost, passing his
+eye over Donald and Davy and settling it upon the Kid.
+
+A first meeting in the wilderness is not characterized by formality.  The
+talk quickly became general, and the news of the Upper and Lower
+Countries was swapped equitably back and forth.  But the little the
+newcomers had was soon over with, for they had wintered at Minook, a
+thousand miles below, where nothing was doing.  Montana Kid, however, was
+fresh from Salt Water, and they annexed him while they pitched camp,
+swamping him with questions concerning the outside, from which they had
+been cut off for a twelvemonth.
+
+A shrieking split, suddenly lifting itself above the general uproar on
+the river, drew everybody to the bank.  The surface water had increased
+in depth, and the ice, assailed from above and below, was struggling to
+tear itself from the grip of the shores.  Fissures reverberated into life
+before their eyes, and the air was filled with multitudinous crackling,
+crisp and sharp, like the sound that goes up on a clear day from the
+firing line.
+
+From up the river two men were racing a dog team toward them on an
+uncovered stretch of ice.  But even as they looked, the pair struck the
+water and began to flounder through.  Behind, where their feet had sped
+the moment before, the ice broke up and turned turtle.  Through this
+opening the river rushed out upon them to their waists, burying the sled
+and swinging the dogs off at right angles in a drowning tangle.  But the
+men stopped their flight to give the animals a fighting chance, and they
+groped hurriedly in the cold confusion, slashing at the detaining traces
+with their sheath-knives.  Then they fought their way to the bank through
+swirling water and grinding ice, where, foremost in leaping to the rescue
+among the jarring fragments, was the Kid.
+
+"Why, blime me, if it ain't Montana Kid!" exclaimed one of the men whom
+the Kid was just placing upon his feet at the top of the bank.  He wore
+the scarlet tunic of the Mounted Police and jocularly raised his right
+hand in salute.
+
+"Got a warrant for you, Kid," he continued, drawing a bedraggled paper
+from his breast pocket, "an' I 'ope as you'll come along peaceable."
+
+Montana Kid looked at the chaotic river and shrugged his shoulders, and
+the policeman, following his glance, smiled.
+
+"Where are the dogs?" his companion asked.
+
+"Gentlemen," interrupted the policeman, "this 'ere mate o' mine is Jack
+Sutherland, owner of Twenty-Two Eldorado--"
+
+"Not Sutherland of '92?" broke in the snow-blinded Minook man, groping
+feebly toward him.
+
+"The same."  Sutherland gripped his hand.
+
+"And you?"
+
+"Oh, I'm after your time, but I remember you in my freshman year,--you
+were doing P. G. work then.  Boys," he called, turning half about, "this
+is Sutherland, Jack Sutherland, erstwhile full-back on the 'Varsity.  Come
+up, you gold-chasers, and fall upon him!  Sutherland, this is
+Greenwich,--played quarter two seasons back."
+
+"Yes, I read of the game," Sutherland said, shaking hands.  "And I
+remember that big run of yours for the first touchdown."
+
+Greenwich flushed darkly under his tanned skin and awkwardly made room
+for another.
+
+"And here's Matthews,--Berkeley man.  And we've got some Eastern cracks
+knocking about, too.  Come up, you Princeton men!  Come up!  This is
+Sutherland, Jack Sutherland!"
+
+Then they fell upon him heavily, carried him into camp, and supplied him
+with dry clothes and numerous mugs of black tea.
+
+Donald and Davy, overlooked, had retired to their nightly game of crib.
+Montana Kid followed them with the policeman.
+
+"Here, get into some dry togs," he said, pulling them from out his scanty
+kit.  "Guess you'll have to bunk with me, too."
+
+"Well, I say, you're a good 'un," the policeman remarked as he pulled on
+the other man's socks. "Sorry I've got to take you back to Dawson, but I
+only 'ope they won't be 'ard on you."
+
+"Not so fast."  The Kid smiled curiously.  "We ain't under way yet.  When
+I go I'm going down river, and I guess the chances are you'll go along."
+
+"Not if I know myself--"
+
+"Come on outside, and I'll show you, then.  These damn fools," thrusting
+a thumb over his shoulder at the two Scots, "played smash when they
+located here.  Fill your pipe, first--this is pretty good plug--and enjoy
+yourself while you can.  You haven't many smokes before you."
+
+The policeman went with him wonderingly, while Donald and Davy dropped
+their cards and followed.  The Minook men noticed Montana Kid pointing
+now up the river, now down, and came over.
+
+"What's up?" Sutherland demanded.
+
+"Nothing much."  Nonchalance sat well upon the Kid.  "Just a case of
+raising hell and putting a chunk under.  See that bend down there?  That's
+where she'll jam millions of tons of ice.  Then she'll jam in the bends
+up above, millions of tons.  Upper jam breaks first, lower jam holds,
+pouf!"  He dramatically swept the island with his hand.  "Millions of
+tons," he added reflectively.
+
+"And what of the woodpiles?" Davy questioned.
+
+The Kid repeated his sweeping gestures and Davy wailed, "The labor of
+months!  It canna be!  Na, na, lad, it canna be.  I doot not it's a jowk.
+Ay, say that it is," he appealed.
+
+But when the Kid laughed harshly and turned on his heel, Davy flung
+himself upon the piles and began frantically to toss the cordwood back
+from the bank.
+
+"Lend a hand, Donald!" he cried.  "Can ye no lend a hand?  'T is the
+labor of months and the passage home!"
+
+Donald caught him by the arm and shook him, but he tore free.  "Did ye no
+hear, man?  Millions of tons, and the island shall be sweepit clean."
+
+"Straighten yersel' up, man," said Donald.  "It's a bit fashed ye are."
+
+But Davy fell upon the cordwood.  Donald stalked back to the cabin,
+buckled on his money belt and Davy's, and went out to the point of the
+island where the ground was highest and where a huge pine towered above
+its fellows.
+
+The men before the cabin heard the ringing of his axe and smiled.
+Greenwich returned from across the island with the word that they were
+penned in.  It was impossible to cross the back-channel.  The blind
+Minook man began to sing, and the rest joined in with--
+
+   "Wonder if it's true?
+   Does it seem so to you?
+   Seems to me he's lying--
+   Oh, I wonder if it's true?"
+
+"It's ay sinfu'," Davy moaned, lifting his head and watching them dance
+in the slanting rays of the sun.  "And my guid wood a' going to waste."
+
+   "Oh, I wonder if it's true,"
+
+was flaunted back.
+
+The noise of the river ceased suddenly.  A strange calm wrapped about
+them.  The ice had ripped from the shores and was floating higher on the
+surface of the river, which was rising.  Up it came, swift and silent,
+for twenty feet, till the huge cakes rubbed softly against the crest of
+the bank.  The tail of the island, being lower, was overrun.  Then,
+without effort, the white flood started down-stream.  But the sound
+increased with the momentum, and soon the whole island was shaking and
+quivering with the shock of the grinding bergs.  Under pressure, the
+mighty cakes, weighing hundreds of tons, were shot into the air like
+peas.  The frigid anarchy increased its riot, and the men had to shout
+into one another's ears to be heard.  Occasionally the racket from the
+back channel could be heard above the tumult.  The island shuddered with
+the impact of an enormous cake which drove in squarely upon its point.  It
+ripped a score of pines out by the roots, then swinging around and over,
+lifted its muddy base from the bottom of the river and bore down upon the
+cabin, slicing the bank and trees away like a gigantic knife.  It seemed
+barely to graze the corner of the cabin, but the cribbed logs tilted up
+like matches, and the structure, like a toy house, fell backward in ruin.
+
+"The labor of months!  The labor of months, and the passage home!" Davy
+wailed, while Montana Kid and the policeman dragged him backward from the
+woodpiles.
+
+"You'll 'ave plenty o' hoppertunity all in good time for yer passage
+'ome," the policeman growled, clouting him alongside the head and sending
+him flying into safety.
+
+Donald, from the top of the pine, saw the devastating berg sweep away the
+cordwood and disappear down-stream.  As though satisfied with this
+damage, the ice-flood quickly dropped to its old level and began to
+slacken its pace.  The noise likewise eased down, and the others could
+hear Donald shouting from his eyrie to look down-stream.  As forecast,
+the jam had come among the islands in the bend, and the ice was piling up
+in a great barrier which stretched from shore to shore.  The river came
+to a standstill, and the water finding no outlet began to rise.  It
+rushed up till the island was awash, the men splashing around up to their
+knees, and the dogs swimming to the ruins of the cabin.  At this stage it
+abruptly became stationary, with no perceptible rise or fall.
+
+Montana Kid shook his head.  "It's jammed above, and no more's coming
+down."
+
+"And the gamble is, which jam will break first," Sutherland added.
+
+"Exactly," the Kid affirmed.  "If the upper jam breaks first, we haven't
+a chance.  Nothing will stand before it."
+
+The Minook men turned away in silence, but soon "Rumsky Ho" floated upon
+the quiet air, followed by "The Orange and the Black."  Room was made in
+the circle for Montana Kid and the policeman, and they quickly caught the
+ringing rhythm of the choruses as they drifted on from song to song.
+
+"Oh, Donald, will ye no lend a hand?" Davy sobbed at the foot of the tree
+into which his comrade had climbed.  "Oh, Donald, man, will ye no lend a
+hand?" he sobbed again, his hands bleeding from vain attempts to scale
+the slippery trunk.
+
+But Donald had fixed his gaze up river, and now his voice rang out,
+vibrant with fear:--
+
+   "God Almichty, here she comes!"
+
+Standing knee-deep in the icy water, the Minook men, with Montana Kid and
+the policeman, gripped hands and raised their voices in the terrible,
+"Battle Hymn of the Republic."  But the words were drowned in the
+advancing roar.
+
+And to Donald was vouchsafed a sight such as no man may see and live.  A
+great wall of white flung itself upon the island.  Trees, dogs, men, were
+blotted out, as though the hand of God had wiped the face of nature
+clean.  This much he saw, then swayed an instant longer in his lofty
+perch and hurtled far out into the frozen hell.
+
+
+
+
+THE SCORN OF WOMEN
+
+
+I
+
+
+Once Freda and Mrs. Eppingwell clashed.
+
+Now Freda was a Greek girl and a dancer.  At least she purported to be
+Greek; but this was doubted by many, for her classic face had overmuch
+strength in it, and the tides of hell which rose in her eyes made at rare
+moments her ethnology the more dubious.  To a few--men--this sight had
+been vouchsafed, and though long years may have passed, they have not
+forgotten, nor will they ever forget.  She never talked of herself, so
+that it were well to let it go down that when in repose, expurgated,
+Greek she certainly was.  Her furs were the most magnificent in all the
+country from Chilcoot to St. Michael's, and her name was common on the
+lips of men.  But Mrs. Eppingwell was the wife of a captain; also a
+social constellation of the first magnitude, the path of her orbit
+marking the most select coterie in Dawson,--a coterie captioned by the
+profane as the "official clique."  Sitka Charley had travelled trail with
+her once, when famine drew tight and a man's life was less than a cup of
+flour, and his judgment placed her above all women.  Sitka Charley was an
+Indian; his criteria were primitive; but his word was flat, and his
+verdict a hall-mark in every camp under the circle.
+
+These two women were man-conquering, man-subduing machines, each in her
+own way, and their ways were different.  Mrs. Eppingwell ruled in her own
+house, and at the Barracks, where were younger sons galore, to say
+nothing of the chiefs of the police, the executive, and the judiciary.
+Freda ruled down in the town; but the men she ruled were the same who
+functioned socially at the Barracks or were fed tea and canned preserves
+at the hand of Mrs. Eppingwell in her hillside cabin of rough-hewn logs.
+Each knew the other existed; but their lives were apart as the Poles, and
+while they must have heard stray bits of news and were curious, they were
+never known to ask a question.  And there would have been no trouble had
+not a free lance in the shape of the model-woman come into the land on
+the first ice, with a spanking dog-team and a cosmopolitan reputation.
+Loraine Lisznayi--alliterative, dramatic, and Hungarian--precipitated the
+strife, and because of her Mrs. Eppingwell left her hillside and invaded
+Freda's domain, and Freda likewise went up from the town to spread
+confusion and embarrassment at the Governor's ball.
+
+All of which may be ancient history so far as the Klondike is concerned,
+but very few, even in Dawson, know the inner truth of the matter; nor
+beyond those few are there any fit to measure the wife of the captain or
+the Greek dancer.  And that all are now permitted to understand, let
+honor be accorded Sitka Charley.  From his lips fell the main facts in
+the screed herewith presented.  It ill befits that Freda herself should
+have waxed confidential to a mere scribbler of words, or that Mrs.
+Eppingwell made mention of the things which happened.  They may have
+spoken, but it is unlikely.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Floyd Vanderlip was a strong man, apparently.  Hard work and hard grub
+had no terrors for him, as his early history in the country attested.  In
+danger he was a lion, and when he held in check half a thousand starving
+men, as he once did, it was remarked that no cooler eye ever took the
+glint of sunshine on a rifle-sight.  He had but one weakness, and even
+that, rising from out his strength, was of a negative sort.  His parts
+were strong, but they lacked co-ordination.  Now it happened that while
+his centre of amativeness was pronounced, it had lain mute and passive
+during the years he lived on moose and salmon and chased glowing
+Eldorados over chill divides.  But when he finally blazed the corner-post
+and centre-stakes on one of the richest Klondike claims, it began to
+quicken; and when he took his place in society, a full-fledged Bonanza
+King, it awoke and took charge of him.  He suddenly recollected a girl in
+the States, and it came to him quite forcibly, not only that she might be
+waiting for him, but that a wife was a very pleasant acquisition for a
+man who lived some several degrees north of 53.  So he wrote an
+appropriate note, enclosed a letter of credit generous enough to cover
+all expenses, including trousseau and chaperon, and addressed it to one
+Flossie.  Flossie?  One could imagine the rest.  However, after that he
+built a comfortable cabin on his claim, bought another in Dawson, and
+broke the news to his friends.
+
+And just here is where the lack of co-ordination came into play.  The
+waiting was tedious, and having been long denied, the amative element
+could not brook further delay.  Flossie was coming; but Loraine Lisznayi
+was here.  And not only was Loraine Lisznayi here, but her cosmopolitan
+reputation was somewhat the worse for wear, and she was not exactly so
+young as when she posed in the studios of artist queens and received at
+her door the cards of cardinals and princes.  Also, her finances were
+unhealthy.  Having run the gamut in her time, she was now not averse to
+trying conclusions with a Bonanza King whose wealth was such that he
+could not guess it within six figures.  Like a wise soldier casting about
+after years of service for a comfortable billet, she had come into the
+Northland to be married.  So, one day, her eyes flashed up into Floyd
+Vanderlip's as he was buying table linen for Flossie in the P. C.
+Company's store, and the thing was settled out of hand.
+
+When a man is free much may go unquestioned, which, should he be rash
+enough to cumber himself with domestic ties, society will instantly
+challenge.  Thus it was with Floyd Vanderlip.  Flossie was coming, and a
+low buzz went up when Loraine Lisznayi rode down the main street behind
+his wolf-dogs.  She accompanied the lady reporter of the "Kansas City
+Star" when photographs were taken of his Bonanza properties, and watched
+the genesis of a six-column article.  At that time they were dined
+royally in Flossie's cabin, on Flossie's table linen.  Likewise there
+were comings and goings, and junketings, all perfectly proper, by the
+way, which caused the men to say sharp things and the women to be
+spiteful.  Only Mrs. Eppingwell did not hear.  The distant hum of wagging
+tongues rose faintly, but she was prone to believe good of people and to
+close her ears to evil; so she paid no heed.
+
+Not so with Freda.  She had no cause to love men, but, by some strange
+alchemy of her nature, her heart went out to women,--to women whom she
+had less cause to love.  And her heart went out to Flossie, even then
+travelling the Long Trail and facing into the bitter North to meet a man
+who might not wait for her.  A shrinking, clinging sort of a girl, Freda
+pictured her, with weak mouth and pretty pouting lips, blow-away
+sun-kissed hair, and eyes full of the merry shallows and the lesser joys
+of life.  But she also pictured Flossie, face nose-strapped and frost-
+rimed, stumbling wearily behind the dogs.  Wherefore she smiled, dancing
+one night, upon Floyd Vanderlip.
+
+Few men are so constituted that they may receive the smile of Freda
+unmoved; nor among them can Floyd Vanderlip be accounted.  The grace he
+had found with the model-woman had caused him to re-measure himself, and
+by the favor in which he now stood with the Greek dancer he felt himself
+doubly a man.  There were unknown qualities and depths in him, evidently,
+which they perceived.  He did not know exactly what those qualities and
+depths were, but he had a hazy idea that they were there somewhere, and
+of them was bred a great pride in himself.  A man who could force two
+women such as these to look upon him a second time, was certainly a most
+remarkable man.  Some day, when he had the time, he would sit down and
+analyze his strength; but now, just now, he would take what the gods had
+given him.  And a thin little thought began to lift itself, and he fell
+to wondering whatever under the sun he had seen in Flossie, and to regret
+exceedingly that he had sent for her.  Of course, Freda was out of the
+running.  His dumps were the richest on Bonanza Creek, and they were
+many, while he was a man of responsibility and position.  But Loraine
+Lisznayi--she was just the woman.  Her life had been large; she could do
+the honors of his establishment and give tone to his dollars.
+
+But Freda smiled, and continued to smile, till he came to spend much time
+with her.  When she, too, rode down the street behind his wolf-dogs, the
+model-woman found food for thought, and the next time they were together
+dazzled him with her princes and cardinals and personal little anecdotes
+of courts and kings.  She also showed him dainty missives, superscribed,
+"My dear Loraine," and ended "Most affectionately yours," and signed by
+the given name of a real live queen on a throne.  And he marvelled in his
+heart that the great woman should deign to waste so much as a moment upon
+him.  But she played him cleverly, making flattering contrasts and
+comparisons between him and the noble phantoms she drew mainly from her
+fancy, till he went away dizzy with self-delight and sorrowing for the
+world which had been denied him so long.  Freda was a more masterful
+woman.  If she flattered, no one knew it.  Should she stoop, the stoop
+were unobserved.  If a man felt she thought well of him, so subtly was
+the feeling conveyed that he could not for the life of him say why or
+how.  So she tightened her grip upon Floyd Vanderlip and rode daily
+behind his dogs.
+
+And just here is where the mistake occurred.  The buzz rose loudly and
+more definitely, coupled now with the name of the dancer, and Mrs.
+Eppingwell heard.  She, too, thought of Flossie lifting her moccasined
+feet through the endless hours, and Floyd Vanderlip was invited up the
+hillside to tea, and invited often.  This quite took his breath away, and
+he became drunken with appreciation of himself.  Never was man so
+maltreated.  His soul had become a thing for which three women struggled,
+while a fourth was on the way to claim it.  And three such women!
+
+But Mrs. Eppingwell and the mistake she made.  She spoke of the affair,
+tentatively, to Sitka Charley, who had sold dogs to the Greek girl.  But
+no names were mentioned.  The nearest approach to it was when Mrs.
+Eppingwell said, "This--er--horrid woman," and Sitka Charley, with the
+model-woman strong in his thoughts, had echoed, "--er--horrid woman."  And
+he agreed with her, that it was a wicked thing for a woman to come
+between a man and the girl he was to marry.  "A mere girl, Charley," she
+said, "I am sure she is.  And she is coming into a strange country
+without a friend when she gets here.  We must do something."  Sitka
+Charley promised his help, and went away thinking what a wicked woman
+this Loraine Lisznayi must be, also what noble women Mrs. Eppingwell and
+Freda were to interest themselves in the welfare of the unknown Flossie.
+
+Now Mrs. Eppingwell was open as the day.  To Sitka Charley, who took her
+once past the Hills of Silence, belongs the glory of having memorialized
+her clear-searching eyes, her clear-ringing voice, and her utter
+downright frankness.  Her lips had a way of stiffening to command, and
+she was used to coming straight to the point.  Having taken Floyd
+Vanderlip's measurement, she did not dare this with him; but she was not
+afraid to go down into the town to Freda.  And down she went, in the
+bright light of day, to the house of the dancer.  She was above silly
+tongues, as was her husband, the captain.  She wished to see this woman
+and to speak with her, nor was she aware of any reason why she should
+not.  So she stood in the snow at the Greek girl's door, with the frost
+at sixty below, and parleyed with the waiting-maid for a full five
+minutes.  She had also the pleasure of being turned away from that door,
+and of going back up the hill, wroth at heart for the indignity which had
+been put upon her.  "Who was this woman that she should refuse to see
+her?" she asked herself.  One would think it the other way around, and
+she herself but a dancing girl denied at the door of the wife of a
+captain.  As it was, she knew, had Freda come up the hill to her,--no
+matter what the errand,--she would have made her welcome at her fire, and
+they would have sat there as two women, and talked, merely as two women.
+She had overstepped convention and lowered herself, but she had thought
+it different with the women down in the town.  And she was ashamed that
+she had laid herself open to such dishonor, and her thoughts of Freda
+were unkind.
+
+Not that Freda deserved this.  Mrs. Eppingwell had descended to meet her
+who was without caste, while she, strong in the traditions of her own
+earlier status, had not permitted it.  She could worship such a woman,
+and she would have asked no greater joy than to have had her into the
+cabin and sat with her, just sat with her, for an hour.  But her respect
+for Mrs. Eppingwell, and her respect for herself, who was beyond respect,
+had prevented her doing that which she most desired.  Though not quite
+recovered from the recent visit of Mrs. McFee, the wife of the minister,
+who had descended upon her in a whirlwind of exhortation and brimstone,
+she could not imagine what had prompted the present visit.  She was not
+aware of any particular wrong she had done, and surely this woman who
+waited at the door was not concerned with the welfare of her soul.  Why
+had she come?  For all the curiosity she could not help but feel, she
+steeled herself in the pride of those who are without pride, and trembled
+in the inner room like a maid on the first caress of a lover.  If Mrs.
+Eppingwell suffered going up the hill, she too suffered, lying face
+downward on the bed, dry-eyed, dry-mouthed, dumb.
+
+Mrs. Eppingwell's knowledge of human nature was great.  She aimed at
+universality.  She had found it easy to step from the civilized and
+contemplate things from the barbaric aspect.  She could comprehend
+certain primal and analogous characteristics in a hungry wolf-dog or a
+starving man, and predicate lines of action to be pursued by either under
+like conditions.  To her, a woman was a woman, whether garbed in purple
+or the rags of the gutter; Freda was a woman.  She would not have been
+surprised had she been taken into the dancer's cabin and encountered on
+common ground; nor surprised had she been taken in and flaunted in
+prideless arrogance.  But to be treated as she had been treated, was
+unexpected and disappointing.  Ergo, she had not caught Freda's point of
+view.  And this was good.  There are some points of view which cannot be
+gained save through much travail and personal crucifixion, and it were
+well for the world that its Mrs. Eppingwells should, in certain ways,
+fall short of universality.  One cannot understand defilement without
+laying hands to pitch, which is very sticky, while there be plenty
+willing to undertake the experiment.  All of which is of small concern,
+beyond the fact that it gave Mrs. Eppingwell ground for grievance, and
+bred for her a greater love in the Greek girl's heart.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+And in this way things went along for a month,--Mrs. Eppingwell striving
+to withhold the man from the Greek dancer's blandishments against the
+time of Flossie's coming; Flossie lessening the miles each day on the
+dreary trail; Freda pitting her strength against the model-woman; the
+model-woman straining every nerve to land the prize; and the man moving
+through it all like a flying shuttle, very proud of himself, whom he
+believed to be a second Don Juan.
+
+It was nobody's fault except the man's that Loraine Lisznayi at last
+landed him.  The way of a man with a maid may be too wonderful to know,
+but the way of a woman with a man passeth all conception; whence the
+prophet were indeed unwise who would dare forecast Floyd Vanderlip's
+course twenty-four hours in advance.  Perhaps the model-woman's
+attraction lay in that to the eye she was a handsome animal; perhaps she
+fascinated him with her old-world talk of palaces and princes; leastwise
+she dazzled him whose life had been worked out in uncultured roughness,
+and he at last agreed to her suggestion of a run down the river and a
+marriage at Forty Mile.  In token of his intention he bought dogs from
+Sitka Charley,--more than one sled is necessary when a woman like Loraine
+Lisznayi takes to the trail, and then went up the creek to give orders
+for the superintendence of his Bonanza mines during his absence.
+
+He had given it out, rather vaguely, that he needed the animals for
+sledding lumber from the mill to his sluices, and right here is where
+Sitka Charley demonstrated his fitness.  He agreed to furnish dogs on a
+given date, but no sooner had Floyd Vanderlip turned his toes up-creek,
+than Charley hied himself away in perturbation to Loraine Lisznayi.  Did
+she know where Mr. Vanderlip had gone?  He had agreed to supply that
+gentleman with a big string of dogs by a certain time; but that shameless
+one, the German trader Meyers, had been buying up the brutes and skimped
+the market.  It was very necessary he should see Mr. Vanderlip, because
+of the shameless one he would be all of a week behindhand in filling the
+contract.  She did know where he had gone?  Up-creek?  Good!  He would
+strike out after him at once and inform him of the unhappy delay.  Did he
+understand her to say that Mr. Vanderlip needed the dogs on Friday night?
+that he must have them by that time?  It was too bad, but it was the
+fault of the shameless one who had bid up the prices.  They had jumped
+fifty dollars per head, and should he buy on the rising market he would
+lose by the contract.  He wondered if Mr. Vanderlip would be willing to
+meet the advance.  She knew he would?  Being Mr. Vanderlip's friend, she
+would even meet the difference herself?  And he was to say nothing about
+it?  She was kind to so look to his interests.  Friday night, did she
+say?  Good!  The dogs would be on hand.
+
+An hour later, Freda knew the elopement was to be pulled off on Friday
+night; also, that Floyd Vanderlip had gone up-creek, and her hands were
+tied.  On Friday morning, Devereaux, the official courier, bearing
+despatches from the Governor, arrived over the ice.  Besides the
+despatches, he brought news of Flossie.  He had passed her camp at Sixty
+Mile; humans and dogs were in good condition; and she would doubtless be
+in on the morrow.  Mrs. Eppingwell experienced a great relief on hearing
+this; Floyd Vanderlip was safe up-creek, and ere the Greek girl could
+again lay hands upon him, his bride would be on the ground.  But that
+afternoon her big St. Bernard, valiantly defending her front stoop, was
+downed by a foraging party of trail-starved Malemutes.  He was buried
+beneath the hirsute mass for about thirty seconds, when rescued by a
+couple of axes and as many stout men.  Had he remained down two minutes,
+the chances were large that he would have been roughly apportioned and
+carried away in the respective bellies of the attacking party; but as it
+was, it was a mere case of neat and expeditious mangling.  Sitka Charley
+came to repair the damages, especially a right fore-paw which had
+inadvertently been left a fraction of a second too long in some other
+dog's mouth.  As he put on his mittens to go, the talk turned upon
+Flossie and in natural sequence passed on to the--"er horrid woman."
+Sitka Charley remarked incidentally that she intended jumping out down
+river that night with Floyd Vanderlip, and further ventured the
+information that accidents were very likely at that time of year.
+
+So Mrs. Eppingwell's thoughts of Freda were unkinder than ever.  She
+wrote a note, addressed it to the man in question, and intrusted it to a
+messenger who lay in wait at the mouth of Bonanza Creek.  Another man,
+bearing a note from Freda, also waited at that strategic point.  So it
+happened that Floyd Vanderlip, riding his sled merrily down with the last
+daylight, received the notes together.  He tore Freda's across.  No, he
+would not go to see her.  There were greater things afoot that night.
+Besides, she was out of the running.  But Mrs. Eppingwell!  He would
+observe her last wish,--or rather, the last wish it would be possible for
+him to observe,--and meet her at the Governor's ball to hear what she had
+to say.  From the tone of the writing it was evidently important;
+perhaps-- He smiled fondly, but failed to shape the thought.  Confound it
+all, what a lucky fellow he was with the women any way!  Scattering her
+letter to the frost, he _mushed_ the dogs into a swinging lope and headed
+for his cabin.  It was to be a masquerade, and he had to dig up the
+costume used at the Opera House a couple of months before.  Also, he had
+to shave and to eat.  Thus it was that he, alone of all interested, was
+unaware of Flossie's proximity.
+
+"Have them down to the water-hole off the hospital, at midnight, sharp.
+Don't fail me," he said to Sitka Charley, who dropped in with the advice
+that only one dog was lacking to fill the bill, and that that one would
+be forthcoming in an hour or so.  "Here's the sack.  There's the scales.
+Weigh out your own dust and don't bother me.  I've got to get ready for
+the ball."
+
+Sitka Charley weighed out his pay and departed, carrying with him a
+letter to Loraine Lisznayi, the contents of which he correctly imagined
+to refer to a meeting at the water-hole of the hospital, at midnight,
+sharp.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Twice Freda sent messengers up to the Barracks, where the dance was in
+full swing, and as often they came back without answers.  Then she did
+what only Freda could do--put on her furs, masked her face, and went up
+herself to the Governor's ball.  Now there happened to be a custom--not
+an original one by any means--to which the official clique had long since
+become addicted.  It was a very wise custom, for it furnished protection
+to the womankind of the officials and gave greater selectness to their
+revels.  Whenever a masquerade was given, a committee was chosen, the
+sole function of which was to stand by the door and peep beneath each and
+every mask.  Most men did not clamor to be placed upon this committee,
+while the very ones who least desired the honor were the ones whose
+services were most required.  The chaplain was not well enough acquainted
+with the faces and places of the townspeople to know whom to admit and
+whom to turn away.  In like condition were the several other worthy
+gentlemen who would have asked nothing better than to so serve.  To fill
+the coveted place, Mrs. McFee would have risked her chance of salvation,
+and did, one night, when a certain trio passed in under her guns and
+muddled things considerably before their identity was discovered.
+Thereafter only the fit were chosen, and very ungracefully did they
+respond.
+
+On this particular night Prince was at the door.  Pressure had been
+brought to bear, and he had not yet recovered from amaze at his having
+consented to undertake a task which bid fair to lose him half his
+friends, merely for the sake of pleasing the other half.  Three or four
+of the men he had refused were men whom he had known on creek and
+trail,--good comrades, but not exactly eligible for so select an affair.
+He was canvassing the expediency of resigning the post there and then,
+when a woman tripped in under the light.  Freda!  He could swear it by
+the furs, did he not know that poise of head so well.  The last one to
+expect in all the world.  He had given her better judgment than to thus
+venture the ignominy of refusal, or, if she passed, the scorn of women.
+He shook his head, without scrutiny; he knew her too well to be mistaken.
+But she pressed closer.  She lifted the black silk ribbon and as quickly
+lowered it again.  For one flashing, eternal second he looked upon her
+face.  It was not for nothing, the saying which had arisen in the
+country, that Freda played with men as a child with bubbles.  Not a word
+was spoken.  Prince stepped aside, and a few moments later might have
+been seen resigning, with warm incoherence, the post to which he had been
+unfaithful.
+
+* * * * *
+
+A woman, flexible of form, slender, yet rhythmic of strength in every
+movement, now pausing with this group, now scanning that, urged a
+restless and devious course among the revellers.  Men recognized the
+furs, and marvelled,--men who should have served upon the door committee;
+but they were not prone to speech.  Not so with the women.  They had
+better eyes for the lines of figure and tricks of carriage, and they knew
+this form to be one with which they were unfamiliar; likewise the furs.
+Mrs. McFee, emerging from the supper-room where all was in readiness,
+caught one flash of the blazing, questing eyes through the silken mask-
+slits, and received a start.  She tried to recollect where she had seen
+the like, and a vivid picture was recalled of a certain proud and
+rebellious sinner whom she had once encountered on a fruitless errand for
+the Lord.
+
+So it was that the good woman took the trail in hot and righteous wrath,
+a trail which brought her ultimately into the company of Mrs. Eppingwell
+and Floyd Vanderlip.  Mrs. Eppingwell had just found the opportunity to
+talk with the man.  She had determined, now that Flossie was so near at
+hand, to proceed directly to the point, and an incisive little ethical
+discourse was titillating on the end of her tongue, when the couple
+became three.  She noted, and pleasurably, the faintly foreign accent of
+the "Beg pardon" with which the furred woman prefaced her immediate
+appropriation of Floyd Vanderlip; and she courteously bowed her
+permission for them to draw a little apart.
+
+Then it was that Mrs. McFee's righteous hand descended, and accompanying
+it in its descent was a black mask torn from a startled woman.  A
+wonderful face and brilliant eyes were exposed to the quiet curiosity of
+those who looked that way, and they were everybody.  Floyd Vanderlip was
+rather confused.  The situation demanded instant action on the part of a
+man who was not beyond his depth, while _he_ hardly knew where he was.  He
+stared helplessly about him.  Mrs. Eppingwell was perplexed.  She could
+not comprehend.  An explanation was forthcoming, somewhere, and Mrs.
+McFee was equal to it.
+
+"Mrs. Eppingwell," and her Celtic voice rose shrilly, "it is with great
+pleasure I make you acquainted with Freda Moloof, _Miss_ Freda Moloof, as
+I understand."
+
+Freda involuntarily turned.  With her own face bared, she felt as in a
+dream, naked, upon her turned the clothed features and gleaming eyes of
+the masked circle.  It seemed, almost, as though a hungry wolf-pack
+girdled her, ready to drag her down.  It might chance that some felt pity
+for her, she thought, and at the thought, hardened.  She would by far
+prefer their scorn.  Strong of heart was she, this woman, and though she
+had hunted the prey into the midst of the pack, Mrs. Eppingwell or no
+Mrs. Eppingwell, she could not forego the kill.
+
+But here Mrs. Eppingwell did a strange thing.  So this, at last, was
+Freda, she mused, the dancer and the destroyer of men; the woman from
+whose door she had been turned.  And she, too, felt the imperious
+creature's nakedness as though it were her own.  Perhaps it was this, her
+Saxon disinclination to meet a disadvantaged foe, perhaps, forsooth, that
+it might give her greater strength in the struggle for the man, and it
+might have been a little of both; but be that as it may, she did do this
+strange thing.  When Mrs. McFee's thin voice, vibrant with malice, had
+raised, and Freda turned involuntarily, Mrs. Eppingwell also turned,
+removed her mask, and inclined her head in acknowledgment.
+
+It was another flashing, eternal second, during which these two women
+regarded each other.  The one, eyes blazing, meteoric; at bay,
+aggressive; suffering in advance and resenting in advance the scorn and
+ridicule and insult she had thrown herself open to; a beautiful, burning,
+bubbling lava cone of flesh and spirit.  And the other, calm-eyed, cool-
+browed, serene; strong in her own integrity, with faith in herself,
+thoroughly at ease; dispassionate, imperturbable; a figure chiselled from
+some cold marble quarry.  Whatever gulf there might exist, she recognized
+it not.  No bridging, no descending; her attitude was that of perfect
+equality.  She stood tranquilly on the ground of their common womanhood.
+And this maddened Freda.  Not so, had she been of lesser breed; but her
+soul's plummet knew not the bottomless, and she could follow the other
+into the deeps of her deepest depths and read her aright.  "Why do you
+not draw back your garment's hem?" she was fain to cry out, all in that
+flashing, dazzling second.  "Spit upon me, revile me, and it were greater
+mercy than this!"  She trembled.  Her nostrils distended and quivered.
+But she drew herself in check, returned the inclination of head, and
+turned to the man.
+
+"Come with me, Floyd," she said simply.  "I want you now."
+
+"What the--" he began explosively, and quit as suddenly, discreet enough
+to not round it off.  Where the deuce had his wits gone, anyway?  Was
+ever a man more foolishly placed?  He gurgled deep down in his throat and
+high up in the roof of his mouth, heaved as one his big shoulders and his
+indecision, and glared appealingly at the two women.
+
+"I beg pardon, just a moment, but may I speak first with Mr. Vanderlip?"
+Mrs. Eppingwell's voice, though flute-like and low, predicated will in
+its every cadence.
+
+The man looked his gratitude.  He, at least, was willing enough.
+
+"I'm very sorry," from Freda.  "There isn't time.  He must come at once."
+The conventional phrases dropped easily from her lips, but she could not
+forbear to smile inwardly at their inadequacy and weakness.  She would
+much rather have shrieked.
+
+"But, Miss Moloof, who are you that you may possess yourself of Mr.
+Vanderlip and command his actions?"
+
+Whereupon relief brightened his face, and the man beamed his approval.
+Trust Mrs. Eppingwell to drag him clear.  Freda had met her match this
+time.
+
+"I--I--" Freda hesitated, and then her feminine mind putting on its
+harness--"and who are you to ask this question?"
+
+"I?  I am Mrs. Eppingwell, and--"
+
+"There!" the other broke in sharply.  "You are the wife of a captain, who
+is therefore your husband.  I am only a dancing girl.  What do you with
+this man?"
+
+"Such unprecedented behavior!" Mrs. McFee ruffled herself and cleared for
+action, but Mrs. Eppingwell shut her mouth with a look and developed a
+new attack.
+
+"Since Miss Moloof appears to hold claims upon you, Mr. Vanderlip, and is
+in too great haste to grant me a few seconds of your time, I am forced to
+appeal directly to you.  May I speak with you, alone, and now?"
+
+Mrs. McFee's jaws brought together with a snap.  That settled the
+disgraceful situation.
+
+"Why, er--that is, certainly," the man stammered.  "Of course, of
+course," growing more effusive at the prospect of deliverance.
+
+Men are only gregarious vertebrates, domesticated and evolved, and the
+chances are large that it was because the Greek girl had in her time
+dealt with wilder masculine beasts of the human sort; for she turned upon
+the man with hell's tides aflood in her blazing eyes, much as a
+bespangled lady upon a lion which has suddenly imbibed the pernicious
+theory that he is a free agent.  The beast in him fawned to the lash.
+
+"That is to say, ah, afterward.  To-morrow, Mrs. Eppingwell; yes,
+to-morrow.  That is what I meant."  He solaced himself with the fact,
+should he remain, that more embarrassment awaited.  Also, he had an
+engagement which he must keep shortly, down by the water-hole off the
+hospital.  Ye gods! he had never given Freda credit!  Wasn't she
+magnificent!
+
+"I'll thank you for my mask, Mrs. McFee."
+
+That lady, for the nonce speechless, turned over the article in question.
+
+"Good-night, Miss Moloof."  Mrs. Eppingwell was royal even in defeat.
+
+Freda reciprocated, though barely downing the impulse to clasp the
+other's knees and beg forgiveness,--no, not forgiveness, but something,
+she knew not what, but which she none the less greatly desired.
+
+The man was for her taking his arm; but she had made her kill in the
+midst of the pack, and that which led kings to drag their vanquished at
+the chariot-tail, led her toward the door alone, Floyd Vanderlip close at
+heel and striving to re-establish his mental equilibrium.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+It was bitter cold.  As the trail wound, a quarter of a mile brought them
+to the dancer's cabin, by which time her moist breath had coated her face
+frostily, while his had massed his heavy mustache till conversation was
+painful.  By the greenish light of the aurora borealis, the quicksilver
+showed itself frozen hard in the bulb of the thermometer which hung
+outside the door.  A thousand dogs, in pitiful chorus, wailed their
+ancient wrongs and claimed mercy from the unheeding stars.  Not a breath
+of air was moving.  For them there was no shelter from the cold, no
+shrewd crawling to leeward in snug nooks.  The frost was everywhere, and
+they lay in the open, ever and anon stretching their trail-stiffened
+muscles and lifting the long wolf-howl.
+
+They did not talk at first, the man and the woman.  While the maid helped
+Freda off with her wraps, Floyd Vanderlip replenished the fire; and by
+the time the maid had withdrawn to an inner room, his head over the
+stove, he was busily thawing out his burdened upper lip.  After that he
+rolled a cigarette and watched her lazily through the fragrant eddies.
+She stole a glance at the clock.  It lacked half an hour of midnight.  How
+was she to hold him?  Was he angry for that which she had done?  What was
+his mood?  What mood of hers could meet his best?  Not that she doubted
+herself.  No, no.  Hold him she could, if need be at pistol point, till
+Sitka Charley's work was done, and Devereaux's too.
+
+There were many ways, and with her knowledge of this her contempt for the
+man increased.  As she leaned her head on her hand, a fleeting vision of
+her own girlhood, with its mournful climacteric and tragic ebb, was
+vouchsafed her, and for the moment she was minded to read him a lesson
+from it.  God! it must be less than human brute who could not be held by
+such a tale, told as she could tell it, but--bah!  He was not worth it,
+nor worth the pain to her.  The candle was positioned just right, and
+even as she thought of these things sacredly shameful to her, he was
+pleasuring in the transparent pinkiness of her ear.  She noted his eye,
+took the cue, and turned her head till the clean profile of the face was
+presented.  Not the least was that profile among her virtues.  She could
+not help the lines upon which she had been builded, and they were very
+good; but she had long since learned those lines, and though little they
+needed, was not above advantaging them to the best of her ability.  The
+candle began to flicker.  She could not do anything ungracefully, but
+that did not prevent her improving upon nature a bit, when she reached
+forth and deftly snuffed the red wick from the midst of the yellow flame.
+Again she rested head on hand, this time regarding the man thoughtfully,
+and any man is pleased when thus regarded by a pretty woman.
+
+She was in little haste to begin.  If dalliance were to his liking, it
+was to hers.  To him it was very comfortable, soothing his lungs with
+nicotine and gazing upon her.  It was snug and warm here, while down by
+the water-hole began a trail which he would soon be hitting through the
+chilly hours.  He felt he ought to be angry with Freda for the scene she
+had created, but somehow he didn't feel a bit wrathful.  Like as not
+there wouldn't have been any scene if it hadn't been for that McFee
+woman.  If he were the Governor, he would put a poll tax of a hundred
+ounces a quarter upon her and her kind and all gospel sharks and sky
+pilots.  And certainly Freda had behaved very ladylike, held her own with
+Mrs. Eppingwell besides.  Never gave the girl credit for the grit.  He
+looked lingeringly over her, coming back now and again to the eyes,
+behind the deep earnestness of which he could not guess lay concealed a
+deeper sneer.  And, Jove, wasn't she well put up!  Wonder why she looked
+at him so?  Did she want to marry him, too?  Like as not; but she wasn't
+the only one.  Her looks were in her favor, weren't they?  And
+young--younger than Loraine Lisznayi.  She couldn't be more than twenty-
+three or four, twenty-five at most.  And she'd never get stout.  Anybody
+could guess that the first time.  He couldn't say it of Loraine, though.
+_She_ certainly had put on flesh since the day she served as model.  Huh!
+once he got her on trail he'd take it off.  Put her on the snowshoes to
+break ahead of the dogs.  Never knew it to fail, yet.  But his thought
+leaped ahead to the palace under the lazy Mediterranean sky--and how
+would it be with Loraine then?  No frost, no trail, no famine now and
+again to cheer the monotony, and she getting older and piling it on with
+every sunrise.  While this girl Freda--he sighed his unconscious regret
+that he had missed being born under the flag of the Turk, and came back
+to Alaska.
+
+"Well?"  Both hands of the clock pointed perpendicularly to midnight, and
+it was high time he was getting down to the water-hole.
+
+"Oh!" Freda started, and she did it prettily, delighting him as his
+fellows have ever been delighted by their womankind.  When a man is made
+to believe that a woman, looking upon him thoughtfully, has lost herself
+in meditation over him, that man needs be an extremely cold-blooded
+individual in order to trim his sheets, set a lookout, and steer clear.
+
+"I was just wondering what you wanted to see me about," he explained,
+drawing his chair up to hers by the table.
+
+"Floyd," she looked him steadily in the eyes, "I am tired of the whole
+business.  I want to go away.  I can't live it out here till the river
+breaks.  If I try, I'll die.  I am sure of it.  I want to quit it all and
+go away, and I want to do it at once."
+
+She laid her hand in mute appeal upon the back of his, which turned over
+and became a prison.  Another one, he thought, just throwing herself at
+him.  Guess it wouldn't hurt Loraine to cool her feet by the water-hole a
+little longer.
+
+"Well?"  This time from Freda, but softly and anxiously.
+
+"I don't know what to say," he hastened to answer, adding to himself that
+it was coming along quicker than he had expected.  "Nothing I'd like
+better, Freda.  You know that well enough."  He pressed her hand, palm to
+palm.  She nodded.  Could she wonder that she despised the breed?
+
+"But you see, I--I'm engaged.  Of course you know that.  And the girl's
+coming into the country to marry me.  Don't know what was up with me when
+I asked her, but it was a long while back, and I was all-fired young--"
+
+"I want to go away, out of the land, anywhere," she went on, disregarding
+the obstacle he had reared up and apologized for.  "I have been running
+over the men I know and reached the conclusion that--that--"
+
+"I was the likeliest of the lot?"
+
+She smiled her gratitude for his having saved her the embarrassment of
+confession.  He drew her head against his shoulder with the free hand,
+and somehow the scent of her hair got into his nostrils.  Then he
+discovered that a common pulse throbbed, throbbed, throbbed, where their
+palms were in contact.  This phenomenon is easily comprehensible from a
+physiological standpoint, but to the man who makes the discovery for the
+first time, it is a most wonderful thing.  Floyd Vanderlip had caressed
+more shovel-handles than women's hands in his time, so this was an
+experience quite new and delightfully strange.  And when Freda turned her
+head against his shoulder, her hair brushing his cheek till his eyes met
+hers, full and at close range, luminously soft, ay, and tender--why,
+whose fault was it that he lost his grip utterly?  False to Flossie, why
+not to Loraine?  Even if the women did keep bothering him, that was no
+reason he should make up his mind in a hurry.  Why, he had slathers of
+money, and Freda was just the girl to grace it.  A wife she'd make him
+for other men to envy.  But go slow.  He must be cautious.
+
+"You don't happen to care for palaces, do you?" he asked.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Well, I had a hankering after them myself, till I got to thinking, a
+while back, and I've about sized it up that one'd get fat living in
+palaces, and soft and lazy."
+
+"Yes, it's nice for a time, but you soon grow tired of it, I imagine,"
+she hastened to reassure him.  "The world is good, but life should be
+many-sided.  Rough and knock about for a while, and then rest up
+somewhere.  Off to the South Seas on a yacht, then a nibble of Paris; a
+winter in South America and a summer in Norway; a few months in England--"
+
+"Good society?"
+
+"Most certainly--the best; and then, heigho! for the dogs and sleds and
+the Hudson Bay Country.  Change, you know.  A strong man like you, full
+of vitality and go, could not possibly stand a palace for a year.  It is
+all very well for effeminate men, but you weren't made for such a life.
+You are masculine, intensely masculine."
+
+"Think so?"
+
+"It does not require thinking.  I know.  Have you ever noticed that it
+was easy to make women care for you?"
+
+His dubious innocence was superb.
+
+"It is very easy.  And why?  Because you are masculine.  You strike the
+deepest chords of a woman's heart.  You are something to cling to,--big-
+muscled, strong, and brave.  In short, because you _are_ a man."
+
+She shot a glance at the clock.  It was half after the hour.  She had
+given a margin of thirty minutes to Sitka Charley; and it did not matter,
+now, when Devereaux arrived.  Her work was done.  She lifted her head,
+laughed her genuine mirth, slipped her hand clear, and rising to her feet
+called the maid.
+
+"Alice, help Mr. Vanderlip on with his _parka_.  His mittens are on the
+sill by the stove."
+
+The man could not understand.
+
+"Let me thank you for your kindness, Floyd.  Your time was invaluable to
+me, and it was indeed good of you.  The turning to the left, as you leave
+the cabin, leads the quickest to the water-hole.  Good-night.  I am going
+to bed."
+
+Floyd Vanderlip employed strong words to express his perplexity and
+disappointment.  Alice did not like to hear men swear, so dropped his
+_parka_ on the floor and tossed his mittens on top of it.  Then he made a
+break for Freda, and she ruined her retreat to the inner room by tripping
+over the _parka_.  He brought her up standing with a rude grip on the
+wrist.  But she only laughed.  She was not afraid of men.  Had they not
+wrought their worst with her, and did she not still endure?
+
+"Don't be rough," she said finally.  "On second thought," here she looked
+at his detaining hand, "I've decided not to go to bed yet a while.  Do
+sit down and be comfortable instead of ridiculous.  Any questions?"
+
+"Yes, my lady, and reckoning, too."  He still kept his hold.  "What do
+you know about the water-hole?  What did you mean by--no, never mind.  One
+question at a time."
+
+"Oh, nothing much.  Sitka Charley had an appointment there with somebody
+you may know, and not being anxious for a man of your known charm to be
+present, fell back upon me to kindly help him.  That's all.  They're off
+now, and a good half hour ago."
+
+"Where?  Down river and without me?  And he an Indian!"
+
+"There's no accounting for taste, you know, especially in a woman."
+
+"But how do I stand in this deal?  I've lost four thousand dollars' worth
+of dogs and a tidy bit of a woman, and nothing to show for it.  Except
+you," he added as an afterthought, "and cheap you are at the price."
+
+Freda shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"You might as well get ready.  I'm going out to borrow a couple of teams
+of dogs, and we'll start in as many hours."
+
+"I am very sorry, but I'm going to bed."
+
+"You'll pack if you know what's good for you.  Go to bed, or not, when I
+get my dogs outside, so help me, onto the sled you go.  Mebbe you fooled
+with me, but I'll just see your bluff and take you in earnest.  Hear me?"
+
+He closed on her wrist till it hurt, but on her lips a smile was growing,
+and she seemed to listen intently to some outside sound.  There was a
+jingle of dog bells, and a man's voice crying "Haw!" as a sled took the
+turning and drew up at the cabin.
+
+"_Now_ will you let me go to bed?"
+
+As Freda spoke she threw open the door.  Into the warm room rushed the
+frost, and on the threshold, garbed in trail-worn furs, knee-deep in the
+swirling vapor, against a background of flaming borealis, a woman
+hesitated.  She removed her nose-trap and stood blinking blindly in the
+white candlelight.  Floyd Vanderlip stumbled forward.
+
+"Floyd!" she cried, relieved and glad, and met him with a tired bound.
+
+What could he but kiss the armful of furs?  And a pretty armful it was,
+nestling against him wearily, but happy.
+
+"It was good of you," spoke the armful, "to send Mr. Devereaux with fresh
+dogs after me, else I would not have been in till to-morrow."
+
+The man looked blankly across at Freda, then the light breaking in upon
+him, "And wasn't it good of Devereaux to go?"
+
+"Couldn't wait a bit longer, could you, dear?"  Flossie snuggled closer.
+
+"Well, I was getting sort of impatient," he confessed glibly, at the same
+time drawing her up till her feet left the floor, and getting outside the
+door.
+
+That same night an inexplicable thing happened to the Reverend James
+Brown, missionary, who lived among the natives several miles down the
+Yukon and saw to it that the trails they trod led to the white man's
+paradise.  He was roused from his sleep by a strange Indian, who gave
+into his charge not only the soul but the body of a woman, and having
+done this drove quickly away.  This woman was heavy, and handsome, and
+angry, and in her wrath unclean words fell from her mouth.  This shocked
+the worthy man, but he was yet young and her presence would have been
+pernicious (in the simple eyes of his flock), had she not struck out on
+foot for Dawson with the first gray of dawn.
+
+The shock to Dawson came many days later, when the summer had come and
+the population honored a certain royal lady at Windsor by lining the
+Yukon's bank and watching Sitka Charley rise up with flashing paddle and
+drive the first canoe across the line.  On this day of the races, Mrs.
+Eppingwell, who had learned and unlearned numerous things, saw Freda for
+the first time since the night of the ball.  "Publicly, mind you," as
+Mrs. McFee expressed it, "without regard or respect for the morals of the
+community," she went up to the dancer and held out her hand.  At first,
+it is remembered by those who saw, the girl shrank back, then words
+passed between the two, and Freda, great Freda, broke down and wept on
+the shoulder of the captain's wife.  It was not given to Dawson to know
+why Mrs. Eppingwell should crave forgiveness of a Greek dancing girl, but
+she did it publicly, and it was unseemly.
+
+It were well not to forget Mrs. McFee.  She took a cabin passage on the
+first steamer going out.  She also took with her a theory which she had
+achieved in the silent watches of the long dark nights; and it is her
+conviction that the Northland is unregenerate because it is so cold
+there.  Fear of hell-fire cannot be bred in an ice-box.  This may appear
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