JALAP COOMBS’S FOURTEEN PAIR OF FEET
“Of course, Mr. Coombs, you can’t expect us to go back to St. Michaels
now,” began Phil, as a preliminary to unfolding his scheme for the
discomfiture of Simon Goldollar and his unprincipled companion.
“Why not?” demanded the sailor, who had not for a moment expected
anything else. “As soon as I found ye I were to bring ye to St.
Michaels, and keep ye there till your father comes. Them’s orders, and
to disobey ’em would be mutiny, nigh as I kin make out.”
“That would be all right if you had found us; but you haven’t.”
“Eh?” queried Jalap Coombs. “I hain’t found ye?”
“Certainly not,” laughed Phil. “Instead of you finding us, we have
found you. If you had struck us at Anvik, it is possible that we might
have gone back with you, but as we have found you some four hundred
miles from there, we shall certainly do nothing of the kind. You see,
to begin with, we are under the greatest of obligations to Captain
Hamer, who, by-the-way, is one of the finest men I ever met.”
Here Phil told of the terrible experience he and Serge had undergone in
Bering Sea, and of their gallant rescue by Gerald Hamer, all of which
the absorbed listener now heard for the first time.
“Now,” continued the lad, “we have left him just recovering from a
dangerous illness, and unfitted to travel for some months. If he can’t
get word out to the coast before spring he will be a heavy loser. So
Serge and I have undertaken to carry and deliver the message for him.
Our entire outfit, down to the very clothing we wear, was furnished by
him on that condition. It is also our duty to try and defeat the plans
of his enemies, who are also our enemies, and now seem to have become
yours as well. So you see we are in honor bound to push on with all
speed. Besides all this, we certainly ought to be able to reach Sitka
long before my father can get away from there, and so save him a long,
tedious, and useless journey.”
“I’m not so sartain of that,” demurred Jalap Coombs. “For ye’ve been
trying to make Sitka long’s ever I’ve knowed ye, which is going on
a year now, and hain’t come anywhere nigh to it yet. Still, as my
old friend Kite Roberson useter say, ‘Jalap, my son, allers steer
by sarcumstances; for as a gineral thing they’ll p’int straighter’n
a compass,’ and I am free to admit that your present sarcumstances
is p’inting pretty direct towards Sitka. But how do ye propose to
sarcumvent the villyans what run off with my dogs?”
“Now you are talking straight business,” laughed Phil. “As I understand
it, the main object of those fellows is to capture the next season’s
trade of the Yukon Valley, and especially of the diggings at Forty
Mile, by taking advance orders at lower rates than the old company
has ever before offered. Even then their prices are certain to be
exorbitant, and with Gerald Hamer’s list I am certain I can underbid
them. But that won’t be of any use unless we can be first in the field,
for after the orders are given and contracts signed those other chaps
could laugh at us and our prices. So our only hope is to reach Forty
Mile ahead of them.”
“Which ye can’t do it without wings or steam,” objected Jalap Coombs,
“seeing as they has got two good days’ start on ye.”
“I wouldn’t care if they had six days’ start,” answered Phil. “I am
confident that we could still beat them with just ordinary snow-shoes
and sledges and plain every-day North American dogs. They have gone
around the great arctic bend of the Yukon, haven’t they? And so have a
journey of at least seven hundred miles ahead of them before they reach
Forty Mile.”
“Yes,” replied Jalap. “They said as it were the only navigable channel.”
“Well, it isn’t, for I know of another that is equally good, and two
hundred miles or so shorter. You see, there is a big river coming from
the southeast and emptying into the Yukon somewhere in this vicinity,
called the Tanana.”
“That’s right,” assented the sailor, “for I’ve already passed its mouth
twice about half-way between here and where the _St. Michaels_ is friz
in.”
“Good enough,” said Phil. “Now by following this Tanana for two or
three hundred miles, and taking up one of its eastern branches that is
called the Gheesah, or some such name, and crossing a divide, we can
strike the headwaters of Forty Mile Creek.”
“And sail down with the current, run into port under a full press
of canvas, and capture the market afore the enemy heaves in sight!”
exclaimed Jalap Coombs, enthusiastically, his practical mind quick to
note the advantages of Phil’s scheme. “But what’s to become of me?” he
added, anxiously. “Kin ye fit me out with a new pair of feet?”
“Certainly we can,” replied Phil, promptly. “We can fit you out with
fourteen new pair, and will guarantee that, thus provided, you will be
able to travel as fast as the rest of us.”
“Fourteen pair o’ feet?” repeated Jalap Coombs, reflectively, “and
slow-shoes on every pair? Seems to me, son, you must be calkilating
to run me under a kind of a santipede rig, which it looks like the
strain on the hull would be too great. As for navigating fourteen pair
of slow-shoes all to once, I don’t reckin old Kite hisself could do
it. Still, if you think it can be did, why go ahead and try it on. I’m
agreeable, as the cat said after he’d swallowed the cap’n’s wife’s
canary.”
So Phil’s plan was adopted without a dissenting voice, and from that
moment Jalap Coombs said nothing more about a return to St. Michaels.
That very evening, leaving Serge to see what could be done for
the sailor-man’s lameness, and taking Kurilla with him to act as
interpreter, Phil visited several Indian huts. At these he finally
succeeded in purchasing enough furs and moose-hide for a huge
sleeping-bag, which the several squaws, who, under promise of a liberal
recompense in tea, undertook its construction, promised should be ready
by morning. Phil also bought an immense pair of arctic sleeping-socks
and an extra supply of snow-goggles.
When he told Kurilla of their change of plan, and that they intended
going up the Tanana, the latter replied, dubiously, “Me plenty don’t
know um. Maybe git lose. Yaas.”
“Oh, that’ll be all right,” answered Phil, cheerfully. “You’ll plenty
know um before we get through with um, and whenever you don’t know
which way to go, just come and ask me.”
When he returned to the house he found Serge boiling with indignation.
“Do you know,” he cried, “that Mr. Coombs has walked all the way from
St. Michaels without pads in his boots, because those other fellows
told him his feet would toughen quicker if he didn’t use them? The
consequence is they are simply raw from blisters, and every step he
takes must be like treading on knives.”
“It has been tedious at times,” admitted Jalap Coombs. “And under the
sarcumstances I don’t know but what I’d ruther have one pair of feet
than fourteen, or even half the number.”
“Isn’t it good to have old Jalap with us once more?” asked Phil of
Serge, after they had turned in that night.
“Indeed it is; but do you notice how he has changed?”
“I should say I had. He is like a salt-water fish suddenly dropped into
a fresh-water pond. He’ll come out all right, though, especially if we
can only get his feet into shape again.”
That night the mercury fell to fifty-nine degrees below zero, and the
next morning even Phil, impatient as he was to proceed, had not the
heart to order men and dogs out into that bitter air before sunrise.
With that, however, the mercury began slowly to rise, and when it
had crept up nineteen degrees, or to only forty degrees below, the
young leader declared the weather to be warm enough for anybody. So
he ordered the sledges to be got ready, and when the one drawn by his
own team came dashing up to the door, he announced that Mr. Coombs’s
fourteen pair of feet were at his service. He also politely requested
the sailor-man to crawl into a big fur-lined bag with which the sledge
was provided, and make himself comfortable.
“But, Phil,” demurred the other, “I ain’t no passenger to be tucked up
in a steamer-cheer on deck. I’m shipped for this v’y’ge as one of the
crew.”
“Very well,” replied Phil. “Then of course you will obey orders without
a murmur, for I remember hearing you say, when we were aboard the
_Seamew_, that even if a captain were to order his whole crew to knit
bedquilts or tidies, they’d be bound to obey to the best of their
ability.”
“Sartain,” admitted the other. “I got that from old Kite Roberson,
which bedquilts _and_ tidies were his very words.” Then, without
further remonstrance, the crippled sailor stepped to the sledge, slid
feet first into the big bag, and lay there like an animated mummy, with
the hood of his parka drawn close about his face. Its encircling fringe
of long wolf-hair, added to his preternatural gravity of countenance,
gave him such a comical expression that the boys could not help
shouting with laughter as Kurilla cracked his great whip and the dogs
sprang away with their new burden.
Phil took the lead, as usual, and when they reached the mouth of the
Tanana, which, on account of its broad expanse, there was no chance of
mistaking, he turned into it without hesitation, and in a few minutes
they had taken their last view of the Yukon for many a long day.
At its mouth the Tanana is nearly three miles broad, or as wide as
the Yukon itself, and is filled with islands, on which are stranded
quantities of uprooted trees of greater size than any seen on the Yukon
above that point.
The bitterness of the cold continued unabated, and the sledge party
had hardly lost sight of the Yukon ere the young leader heard himself
hailed from the rear, and paused to learn what was wanted.
“I say, Cap’n Phil,” began Jalap Coombs, with chattering teeth, “is it
your orders or desire that your men should freeze to death?”
“Certainly not,” laughed the lad.
“Then, sir, I has the honor to report that this member of the crew
is already froze solid half-way up, with ice making fast through the
remainder of his system.”
“That is entirely contrary to orders,” replied Phil, sternly, “and must
be stopped at once. So, sir, put your helm to port, and run for yonder
timber.”
Half an hour later poor Jalap was being outwardly thawed by a roaring
fire of great logs, and inwardly by cupful after cupful of scalding
tea, which moved him to remark that, according to his friend Kite
Roberson, tea and coffee were the next best things to observations of
the sun for determining latitude.