very wild.”
“They will trample them; kill them!”
“You thought about that when you kissed him,” he sneered; “the blood
goes straight, and the wind is right. He will have a run for
it--your lover.”
Then the roar of padding feet was louder, and the herd was coming.
They were fifty yards away--and a great, white steer, horned in
splendor, lowered his muzzle, and bellowed, and tore the earth, and
shot out in advance. Another followed, and still another, each
breaking into that rocking run, each one stretching out his nostrils
to taste the polluted air. They plunged together over the little
pool of blood; they rolled over and over, horns tossing, feet
stamping, throats acclaim. The leaders crowded against the corral
until its foot-wide posts bent and cracked. A deafening roar, the
bellow of a thousand mad cattle, and then nothing but a tangled
riot, speeding on down the scent, a thousand great, horned hounds
after their quarry.
It was the blood stampede that makes half-wild cattle wholly demons.
A clap of lightning, a sudden shot, even the appearance of a
dismounted man, will send the mercurial herd rushing in panic fear;
but let them once scent blood, and all hell is loosed in them. No
pack of wolves follows with the relentless fury of range cattle on
the trail of blood. Huddled by the barn, still showing his teeth,
but half in fright, at the box of demons that he had opened, the man
who laid the trail knew all this. And the girl knew it best of all.
She was between him and his horse as she turned on him.
“You did this--you murderer!”
“I will go,” he said; “I will cut it loose--it will stop the
cattle.”
“Yes--_you_! I will go myself.” He jumped at her as she sprang into
his saddle. She saw the movement. His lariat hung at the
saddle-horn. She brought it down on his wrist. The same movement
started the high-strung little roan, already a-quiver with fear. His
heels clattered against the bars; Belle, astride like a man, her
calico skirts tucked about her hips, was riding after the red cloud,
swinging wide into the sage-brush to pass them.
The roan had a dash of the thoroughbred. He was the swiftest thing
coursing that day in the four-cornered race between cattle, cowboys,
hunted team, and woman, yet he had two hundred yards the worst of
his start. But, like a thoroughbred, he caught the bit and shook out
his dapple mane, and laid his belly to the earth as he skimmed. Over
sage-brush, over treacherous ant-hills, tangling gopher-holes he
sped, the reins loose, for he knew his work. Two cowboys, caught in
the press, fighting, swearing, striking brutally at heads and horns
as they were borne on, called to her in warning; but the roan
rounded the pack, shook himself free, and galloped on.
And then Belle saw what she had feared. Knowing their peril, but
ignorant of the cause, the two Englishmen were hurrying on ahead,
with the carcass still bumping from the tail-board. The cattle in
the road, where the running was freer, had gained upon those on the
flanks. They were going in a wedge, with the speed of an express
train. The cows, fleeter and fiercer than the males, were leading
on. Half a dozen cowboys skirmished before, shooting and lashing out
desperately, trying to back-fire by a counter-panic, taking chances
of life with every gopher-hole. But there was no checking that mass;
when a steer flinched before the heavy whip, he was pushed on from
behind. And ever they bellowed, with a note of tigers in their
voices.
A moment Belle ran before the herd; then calling to the roan, who
understood as only a cow-horse can understand, she cut an oblique
course across the herd’s face. She gained the road; the herd was
behind her, and the roan, gathering his nerve for a final spurt,
made for the wagon. She shouted, but the roar behind drowned her
voice, and so she reached for the holster, where Emilio kept his
knife. As she whipped it out and drew even, reaching for the
carcass, the wagon slackened and stopped. Her own horse swerved in
his course, and shot past before she could check him.
The off-horse, what with fear and exhaustion, had stumbled and
fallen dead. And the wedge was coming on, now but a quarter of a
mile away.
Deadly as was their fear, the two Englishmen, who had jumped to the
ground, stood and stared to see her turn in beside the standing
horse and, without any ceremony, cut his traces and reins. He reared
and plunged; Justin caught his bridle.
“Mount quick!” she shouted. And before he could grasp the situation
she had pushed Dudley to her roan, almost thrown him into the
saddle, and mounted behind.
As the snorting horses bounded away, the roar was almost on their
flanks. It rose to its climax in a great, dull crash. Looking back,
the girl saw that they were no longer followed. The dust-cloud was a
whirlpool that rolled and tumbled over the spot where the wagon had
been. For only a minute; the cowboys closed in, and the panic was
over. Slowly the men beat back the sullen, sated demons. And when
the press split there was no wagon at all--only broken wheels and
scattered bits of woodwork, and flattened belongings and
blood--blood and gleaming gray hairs trampled into everything.
The two men dismounted and turned to the girl. Then was she first
aware of her skirts tucked about her hips, and of the manner in
which she had ridden. Her color rose, and she jumped down. She
turned redder a moment later when Dudley Latimer took her in his
arms and, for the second time that morning, kissed her.
And that time he kissed her in deadly earnest.
THE WHITE GRAVE
By C. Alfred
Harrison and his wife were evidently tenderfeet. Worse than that,
they had never been outside the City of New York before; and why an
inexperienced, city-bred young man like Harrison should have
attempted to move a year’s outfit, which weighs a ton, over the
Chilkoot Pass, and tempt Fate in the bleakness of the Yukon country,
no one knew.
The reason really was Harrison’s wife. Tired of a living salary in
the city, she was ready, when news of the Klondike gold-fields
reached the world in 1897, to catch the gold fever; caught it, and
argued Harrison into resigning his clerkship in an insurance
company, and into taking her with him to Alaska. They were very much
in love, and could not be separated. So they invested their savings
in sacks of flour, and blankets, and tins of coffee, and in tickets
to Dyea.
They landed there in December. This, of course, was an idiotic time
to arrive, but they didn’t know, and there were lots of other idiots
just then. When Harrison grasped the fact that he must, himself,
pull all his pile of provisions over the desolate mountain range
that ran upward in front of him, his heart failed him; as the
Yukoners say, he got cold feet. But his wife cheered him. Mrs.
Harrison was young, and, therefore, hopeful. Moreover, she was a
pretty little woman, with a great mass of flaxen hair, and on her
account many a rough packer on the trail gave Harrison a lift with
his load in the steeper places.
They struggled on together through storms and snowdrifts. Little by
little the outfit neared the summit that had lain eighteen miles
from them when first they landed. Every morning Harrison would load
some two hundred and fifty pounds on the sled, pull it up the trail
seven miles or so, and come back in the afternoon. And the girl, for
she was nothing more, would cook their little meals on the
sheet-iron stove, and dry Harrison’s moccasins and coddle him, and
tell him how like it all was to a picnic, and how she enjoyed the
life. Which was not true.
And so they passed through Canyon City, beyond which there is no
God, the packers say, and up to Sheep Camp, which is far up in the
mountains on the timber line, and beyond which there lies a frozen
desolation that supports no living thing--not even the scrubby
spruce that can exist on the bare rock in lower altitudes. Here they
disappeared from view, because the horses do not go past Sheep Camp,
the trail being too rough; and the packers, not seeing them, could
bring no word.
Now, there were hotels of a fashion in Dyea at this time, but the
entire downstairs part was usually made into one room, and used as a
bar, dance-hall, and gambling house. So when Harrison came back down
the trail two weeks later at three o’clock in the morning, he had to
elbow his way up to the bar in the Comique to ask for a room. The
first bartender looked at him inquiringly, for he had seen the
Harrisons on the trail, and the teamsters had said they must be over
the summit by now. His curiosity got the better of him.
“Are you the party that went up with a little blonde lady three
weeks ago?” he asked.
“I may be,” said Harrison.
“She seemed kind of light for this country,” pursued the bartender.
“Hope she’s standing it all right. Did she come down with you?”
“I brought her with me,” said Harrison.
“Isn’t she coming in? She doesn’t have to pass through the saloon
here if she don’t like. She can----”
Harrison’s hand went to his forehead. “She’s dead,” he said.
A teamster came in the side door and spoke to him, and he followed
the man out. So did two of the dance-hall girls and the first
bartender. Outside in one of the big freighting sleds lay Mrs.
Harrison. Her flaxen hair waved as in life over the girlish face,
hard now as marble and colder. The moon shone full upon her, and a
snow crystal hung here and there on the little fur parkee that she
wore. She might have been a marble Madonna there in the moonlight.
Through the open door came the noise of the next waltz. One of the
girls slipped in, and the orchestra stopped. Quickly a little group
began to gather, but Harrison did not move. He seemed as in a
trance, staring open-eyed, mistily, at the frozen woman in the sled.
Presently, Blanche, the girl who had stopped the music, touched him
on the arm.
“I know there is nothing much I can do for you,” she said. “I know
how it feels; but I thought perhaps you’d like to bring her inside,
and you can have my room till you--till the funeral.”
And Harrison thanked her. But next day he moved the body to an empty
cabin that stood on the river bank in the pine grove back of the
Comique. He could not bury her, he could not give her up, he said.
True, she could not speak to him, nor move, but even to have her
body with him was something, a kind of comfort. The bitter cold of
the Northland, the icy winds that roared in untrammeled fury down
the cañon--these had killed her; now they would preserve the beauty
they had stilled; keep her forever young, as he had known and loved
her. Why should he bury her? And when they spoke to him of burial,
he bade them leave him alone.
Only in the afternoons, when there was no dancing in the Comique,
Blanche used still to go daily to the cabin in the pines, and
brought him a padlock for the door, and a lantern, and other things.
It all might have drifted on in such wise indefinitely, had it not
been that in a month Harrison had no money to buy his meals with,
and that Blanche asked him point blank about it.
“Why don’t you come over and ask Coughlin for something to do?” she
said, when Harrison admitted that he had eaten no dinner that day.
Coughlin was the man who ran the Comique.
“What could I do?” inquired Harrison. “I’m only a bookkeeper.”
But that night he asked Coughlin about it. Now twice a day Coughlin
put all the gold and bank-notes that were in the cash drawer into
his pocket, leaving the silver for change; and he kept his accounts,
which were few, in his head; and he didn’t need a bookkeeper. But he
was sorry for Harrison; and, besides, Blanche had spoken to him of
it, and he wanted to oblige her. For Blanche was popular among the
men, and was asked to drink oftener than any girl in the house, and
was valuable on that account in a country where one gets a dollar
for two drinks. So he told Harrison he could go to work.
“In the morning?” said Harrison.
“Any time,” said Coughlin.
Harrison looked around a moment. “If you’ll show me the books, I
think I might look them over now.”
“Books?” said Coughlin, hesitatingly. “There aint any, but I guess
you can figure all right in this, perhaps.” He produced a small
paper-covered blank book from under the bottle rack. “You’ll find a
lead pencil in the drawer any time”; and he bustled over to the
faro-bank, satisfied that he had demonstrated his familiarity with
the bookkeeping craft. He came back to ask Harrison what wages he
was going to work for.
“Anything,” said Harrison. “In New York I got seventy-five dollars a
month.”
“That aint much,” said Coughlin. “I never asked any man to take less
than three dollars a day and board. You can eat in the restaurant
there.” Then he introduced Harrison to Big Joe, the day bartender,
telling Joe this was the bookkeeper.
An hour later Joe called Harrison to announce that Red Sheehan had
got a drink without paying therefor.
“He never will pay for it, either,” continued the experienced Joe,
“but I suppose you’ll put it down in the bookkeeping.”
Harrison seemed a little undecided as to the value of this entry,
and his uncertainty settled it, for thereafter Joe never mentioned
such items, and as for Coughlin, he continued to dump the uncounted
contents of the cash drawer at various times into his pocket, and to
pay his debts out of the same receptacle with a total disregard to
cash balances, daily receipts, or outstanding accounts, which made
Harrison’s methodical hair stand on end.
Occasionally, however, he would ask Harrison how he was getting
along, and Harrison, who had debited Red Sheehan’s account with one
drink, and who had never had occasion to make a second entry of any
kind, generally replied that the work was pretty light.
“That’s all right,” Coughlin would say. “Bookkeepers are mighty
handy to have around in case you want to figure some time.”
And so Harrison drew his three dollars a day, and ate in the
restaurant, where Blanche usually managed to sit opposite. Then in
the evening he sat idle in the Comique, and watched the roulette
wheels spin and the cards drop monotonously from the faro-box, heard
the metallic call of the dealers and the buzz of the ball in the
runaway of the wheel; saw the dancing-girls, in all the glories of
scarlet satin, promiscuous affection, and peroxide hair, waltz past;
listened to the wandering musicians of the orchestra play some good
music and much bad; sat in a chair near the end of the bar, and
watched the carnival of sin and revelry around him, and then, about
midnight, when he felt entitled to leave, he went back to the lonely
cabin, where his wife lay in her changeless sleep, to sit and keep
his vigil with her he had loved in life and still adored in death.
In the restaurant he had many conversations with Blanche. “How long
will you stay here?” she asked him once.
“Always, I suppose,” he said.
“But this is only a boom town,” she answered. “Next year there will
be no one here but the Siwashes, and they will be quarreling among
themselves for these buildings.”
“I’ll stay,” persisted Harrison.
“But how can you live? Coughlin is going down the river this summer,
and a man must eat. Why don’t you come along with the rest of us?
He’ll take everybody that is working here, for he means to open up
again in the Yukon country.” Harrison shook his head.
To Blanche he was interesting. Even in the depths to which she had
fallen, or rather deliberately descended, there exists an
unconfessed desire for the better things of the past, for the moral
levels which have been derided and deserted, for the things which
are bitter with the sourness of the grapes the fox could not attain
to; and to talk with Harrison was a breath from the old world,
monotonous, perhaps, but lovable, where she, too ... but she never
thought of those things. What was the use? It made her sad, and she
would undoubtedly drink more than usual, and get reckless, and buy
wine with her salary and percentage money, and be in debt to the
house for a month afterward. So she didn’t think much. It didn’t
ever occur to her that her interest in Harrison was passing the
danger line. It wouldn’t have made any difference anyway.
* * * * *
A month later, Coughlin announced that the Comique would have a
grand closing one week from that night. “The money is about through
in this town,” he said, in explanation. “We’ll move on to the gold
mines.”
Blanche discussed it that evening with Harrison in the restaurant
The news disturbed him.
“You’ll come, too?” she said. He didn’t know. “There’ll be nothing
here,” she went on, “and it will be so lonely.”
“I don’t mind the loneliness,” said Harrison.
“But I’ll be lonely.”
“Perhaps Coughlin wouldn’t want me, anyway. I haven’t done a stroke
of work while I’ve been here.”
“But he’ll want you if I say so. I’m the best girl he’s got,” said
Blanche, modestly, “and if I say so it goes. And I do say so.”
Harrison was silent. He had often thought of this. He had known, of
course, that he could not live forever at the Comique. Many times he
had decided that death were easier than a final parting from the
dead. He had thought that he could never leave her, but
now---- Well, the lust of life is strong. We do not know how far the
fall is until we stand at the brink and look over. Besides there is
no coming back. If we could only try it for a while and return
again!
“Harrison,” said Blanche, suddenly, “listen. I think I know what you
are thinking, and I know I can not argue such a thing with you. No
one could. You know best, and no one else can know anything about
it. But I want to tell you one fact that perhaps you haven’t thought
of. You want to stay here with her--always. But you can’t. I know it
is horrible to talk of, but it is not always winter even in Alaska,
and the summer is almost here.” The man winced. “Go to bed,
Harrison,” she said; “I can not talk of such things. You know best.”
He went away to the cabin. He knew that Blanche was right. It must
be--but the anguish of it. How should he say the last farewell?
At the foot of the mountains that stretch upward from the Dyea
sands, he dug a grave, four feet. And that night he would bury her.
But his resolution failed him. All night he sat beside the
unreplying dead and stroked her icy hands. “To-morrow I will do it,”
he said. But the next day he dug again in the grave. It should be
six feet. And neither could he say farewell that night.
Then Blanche came over to him. “We leave on Saturday. You know
to-day is Wednesday,” she said, and went away quickly, for she saw
the sheeted form, and understood something of his pain. On Thursday
she came again. Harrison had not been at the restaurant all day, and
she carried a tray with her. The cabin was empty, but a note on the
table said: “I can not give her up. I could not hide her in a grave
of earth. I will lay her on the mountain top above the glacier.
Thank you. Good-by.”
Now the glacier lies in a greater crater of the mountains there,
above the snow line, five thousand feet above Dyea; and behind it
there towers a solitary peak that juts needle-like, head and
shoulders over the lesser crags of the crater. Up above the world,
far from the sound of man, into the great silence it reaches, where
only the northern lights keep the long vigils with its
wind-tormented top.
That night when Blanche asked Billy Matthews, who ought to know,
being a squaw-man and an old-timer there, how long it would take to
go to the glacier, he said the Siwashes called it two days. “And how
long would it take to go to the top of the big peak?” Matthews
smiled. “Why, no one’s ever gone, sis, and I don’t scarcely think
they will.”
But the next day Blanche borrowed the glasses from the trading-post
and watched the snow line. About four o’clock a black speck
gradually emerged at the timber limit, and showed sharply against
the snow-fields that lay beyond. The glasses showed a man with a
long bundle upon his back. Blanche closed them, and watched the
speck with her naked eye. Slowly it crept to the foot of the great
ice rampart, and as it mounted the green precipices, a bank of cloud
engulfed it.
Early next morning Blanche searched the mountain with the glasses.
The speck had crossed the miles of glacier in the night, and was
half way up the mighty pinnacle that lay behind. There it clung to a
precarious hold on the storm-swept crag, its ghastly burden still
upon its shoulders. Five hundred feet below it lay a great
snow-field, hundreds of feet deep. Five hundred feet above it hung
the mountain crest. Blanche could see the wind sweep great banks of
snow around the speck. The footing must have been slippery, for the
speck climbed less than a hundred feet in an hour, and then, as a
wind-gust swept a swirling eddy of sleet across the precipice, it
fell--fell straight to the eternal snows five hundred feet beneath
it, and disappeared. Even with the glasses Blanche could see no hole
in the drift, and besides the wind would fill it full again almost
at once.
Gray-lipped, she sought out Matthews. “Billy,” she asked him, “how
far would a man sink in that snow up there if he fell off the top of
the peak?”
“My God, what questions,” said Billy. “How do I know? He’d stay a
thousand years, anyway.”
THE JEWELS OF BENDITA
By Gibert Cunyngham Terry
Old Bendito was digging when he found them--“the jewels of Bendita.”
He had been ordered by Don Francisco to make a new border around the
“Little Lake of the Emperor” (as it is called even to these days),
and, grumbling mightily, the old man set lazily to work. Stopping
only occasionally to refresh himself with a corn-husk cigarette,
Bendito dug away for as much as two hours, when he was joined by his
comrade, Andrés, who proceeded to pass the time of day.
“What makest thou, friend? Wherefore dost toil so strenuously with
no friend to assist thee, and in the heat of the day?”
“Oh, lazybones! According to that fool, Don Francisco--may the devil
fly away with him--I am making a new bordering for the little lake.
For why? Only God knows. But these strangers--_la Virgen_ bear
witness that--lacking other work, they make a hole in the ground, in
order that a poor devil may have to straightway fill it up again!”
Overwhelmed by his own eloquence, old Bendito groaned, emitted a
fiery Indian oath, and set to spading. “To that mango tree, and no
further, I will dig to-day!” he muttered. “To the devil with Don
Francisco.”
Andrés, sprawling in the sunshine, offered sarcastic comments and
encouragements. “Have a care, comrade. Knowest thou not that there
is wealth concealed in this same garden of the emperor? Oh, yes! I
overheard Padre Diego say so to the Obispo. Be careful lest thou dig
it up, little brother.”
In cynical disbelief, Bendito dug away. “Thinkest thou that if
riches were here, Padre Diego and the Obispo would leave them
untouched? Nonsense. They-of-the-church never allow the paring of a
nail to remain, much less treasure. Compose thyself, little Andrés.
_Once_ there may have been buried treasure of the emperor. But the
nose of the church is sharp, and it smells gold while yet far off.”
At this juncture, Bendito’s spade interrupted conversation with a
loud and startling “clink, clank,” and crossing themselves, their
faces gray with superstitious terror, both _peons_ fled with all
haste from the spot. Their first thought was that a coffin had been
uncovered, and only witches and unblessed heretics would be buried
here in this unhallowed ground. But, as they ran, another idea
occurred to them. They stopped abruptly, and low talk ensued. Then
they stole cautiously back to the mango tree, where the spade still
stood upright. And while old Bendito dug away, in fear and
trembling, but with more energy than he had displayed since the big
earthquake (wherein part of his roof came down upon his head),
Andrés watched to see that no one caught them. Who knew what might
be uncovered? It was well to be cautious.
Firmly embedded in the earth, the men found a large wooden box.
Rotting from damp, with its copper bands oxidized, there still
showed intact an insignia that caused the Indians to tremble with
excitement. And no wonder. They had stumbled upon the buried
treasure of an emperor.