THE DEVIL IN THE KLONDIKE
Spurling, having returned from feeding his dogs, had reseated himself
by the window, but he had not again spoken. When Granger had informed
him that a meal was ready, and had called to him to come and partake,
he had only shaken his head. When, however, it had been brought to
him, he had eaten hungrily, bolting his food like a famished husky,
yet never looking at what he ate, for his eyes were directed along the
river-bed. He used neither fork nor spoon, carrying whatever was set
before him hastily to his mouth in his hands. His whole attitude was
one of hurry; he rested in haste, as if begrudging the moments which
were lost from travel.
Had he been the foremost runner in some great race, who had fallen at
the last lap, and, waiting to recover himself before making the final
dash toward the tape, watched anxiously lest his next rival should
round the bend, and surprise him before he was up on his feet again,
he could not have been more tensely excited. His breath came in gasps
and spasms; his body jerked and trembled even while he sat. He began
to do things, and did not finish them. He opened his mouth to speak,
and was silent. He half rose to his feet, and fell back again. He
turned his head to look at Granger, then thought better of it, and
continued staring into the west. Granger watched him, and wondered
what might be the secret which he was hesitating to impart. Was his
mind a blank through weariness? Was he arguing out some dreadful
problem within himself? Or was he only mad?
What frail and isolated creatures we are!--when once our power of
communicating thought is gone, though we breathe and move above the
earth, we are more distant one from another than if we were truly
dead; for, when a soul has totally forsaken its body, and the body has
ceased to express, we, who live, can at least imagine that the thing
departed sometimes returns and hovers within ourselves. To live and be
silent is a remoter banishment from Life than the irrevocable exile
decreed by Death.
Granger could now see that the change which he had noted in Spurling
might quite well have been the work of a month or two months, and was
due to trouble and neglect. The man was unwashed and unfed, and for
many nights he had not slept. His eyes were ringed and bloodshot with
fatigue, and with incipient snow-blindness. His cheeks were sunken and
cadaverous with too much travel; his body was limp with over-work.
Should the cause of his excitement be suddenly removed, he would
collapse; it was nervous courage which upheld him. And there, despite
all these alterations for the worse, he could still discern the old
Spurling--the man whom he had loved. The brows retained their old
frown of impudent defiance, and the mouth its good-humoured, reckless
contempt. These had been overlaid by some baser passion, it was true;
but they remained, showed through, and seemed recoverable. As he
looked, the memory flashed through his mind of Spurling at his
proudest--on that night at the Mascot dance-hall, when they had
carried into Dawson City the news of the great bonanza they had struck
at Drunkman's Shallows. He was standing on a table, surrounded by a
group of miners, leading the singing, roaring out the doggerel chorus
of a local mining ballad:
"Oh, we'll be there with our bags of gold
When the Judgment trumpets blare,
When the stars drop dead and the moon stands cold,
Tell the angels we'll be there."
Ha, the power of the man and his consciousness of conquest!
Half to himself he began to hum the tune, beating time on the bare
boards with his moccasined feet. In a moment Spurling had jumped up,
"For God's sake, stop! I can't endure that," he cried. "Oh, to think
of it, that I am come to this, and that it is like this we meet after
all these years!" He covered his face with his hands, and, sinking
weakly back in the chair, commenced to sob. Granger went towards him,
and bending over him, flung an arm around his neck. For the moment the
body before him was forgotten; the noble spirit of the man who had
once stood by and helped him, was alone remembered. "Druce, tell me
all," he said.
"I can't; you would shun me."
"Then why did you come if you could not trust me?"
"There was nowhere else to go--no other way of escape. They were all
around me."
"Who were all around you?"
"Those who had come to take me to be hanged."
Granger gasped, and shrank aside. Then his worst conjecture was
correct--it was as bad as that! murder had been done.
Spurling drew himself up suddenly, throwing back his hands and
uncovering a face of ghastly paleness. One might have supposed that he
had been the startled witness to the confession, instead of the man
who had made it.
"What was that I said just now?" he asked. "You must not believe it.
It is not true; I am tired and overstrained. They've hunted me so long
that I myself have come almost to believe their squalid accusations.
Don't look at me like that; I tell you I am innocent. . . . Oh well,
perhaps I did fire the shot; but, if I did, it was an accident. I
didn't know that the rifle had gone off until I saw him drop . . . and
when I laid my hand on him to lift him up, I found that he was dead.
Ugh! Then I hid him in a hole in the ice, and, because he had been my
friend, I thought he would lie quiet forever there and never tell."
While these words had been in the saying, Granger had drawn nearer and
nearer, so that now the two men stood face to face, almost touching,
staring into one another's eyes. Who was this friend who had been
shot? Could it have been Mordaunt? He seized hold of Spurling by the
throat with both hands, and shook him violently, crying, "What was her
name? Will you tell me that?"
Spurling wrenched himself free and his eyes blazed threateningly. "It
wasn't a woman," he said; "thank God, I haven't sunk to that." Then
more slowly, gazing fixedly on Granger as if to calculate how far it
was safe to confide, "and he wasn't a friend of yours," he added.
Granger turned away from the window that the murderer might not see
his countenance; his lips moved as if he prayed. He passed his hand
before his eyes as a man does who has been temporarily blinded by a
sudden flash. He had become terribly aware how near he had been to
committing the crime for which this man was hunted. The knowledge of
that fact gave him sympathy, a lack of which is always based on
ignorance. The compassionate man is invariably one who has been
greatly tempted. In those few seconds whilst he withdrew himself, the
whole portentous problem was argued out, "By how much is this man who
intends, better than that man who accomplishes his crime?" He
concluded that the difference was not one of virtue, but only of
opportunity--which entailed no credit on himself. He had passed
through Spurling's temptation scatheless, therefore he could afford
him tenderness.
"Druce," he said, speaking tremblingly, "it is terrible how far two
men can drift apart in the passage of three short years."
"Then why did you leave me?" asked Spurling sulkily, not yet reassured
of his safety, nor recovered from his rough usage.
"I left you because I feared that I might do the deed for which you
are now in flight."
Spurling sat up astonished. "Lord!" he exclaimed, "have all men felt
like that? I've often wondered why it was that you went away that
night, leaving no message and abandoning your claim. Pray, who were
you fearful of murdering?"
"Listen. If I tell you, it may make it easier for you to believe me,
in spite of what has just happened, when I say that I sincerely want
to help you."
He was interrupted. "I suppose you know," said Spurling with a
shocking attempt at merriment, "that you are losing the thousand
dollars which has been offered for my capture alive or dead? It's only
fair to tell you that. If any man is to make a profit by my hanging,
I'd rather that the man should be a friend."
It was as though one should make an indecent jest in the presence of a
woman newly dead.
"I deserved that you should say that," Granger replied. "But listen to
me this once, for we may never meet again; who knows, in this land of
death? I want to explain to you how it was that I behaved as I did,
and to ask your forgiveness."
"Then make haste," said Spurling, as he drew his chair nearer the
window, and returned his gaze to the west.
Without the dark was falling, though the sky was still faintly stained
with red. It was thus he sat in the unlighted room as they talked
together through the night, a shadowy outline against the misty panes
which never stirred, but stared far away across the frozen quiet of
the land.
Granger spoke again. "You know with what hopes we set out on our
journey to Dawson; how we went there not for the greed of gold, but
for the sake of that other and more secret adventure which, as a boy,
I promised my father I would undertake when I grew to be a man--an
adventure which the Yukon gold could make possible and could purchase.
That was my frame of mind throughout all the time that we were poor up
there. That first winter in the Klondike, when we were nearly starved,
and our money gave out because our grub was exhausted and the price of
provisions ran so high, when we were thankful to work for almost any
wages on Wrath's diggings if only we might get food and keep warm, we
still kept our faith in one another and our purpose in sight. You'll
remember how we used to talk together throughout those long dark days
when, from November to February, we scarcely ever saw the sun and the
thermometer sometimes stood at fifty below, and how we would plan for
our great expedition to El Dorado, when our fortunes should be made,
comforting ourselves for our present privations with thoughts of the
land which Raleigh described. Those, despite their misery, were my
best days--I had hope then. Little Mordaunt would sit beside us, with
his face in his hands and his eyes opened wide with wonder, listening
to what we said; when we had finished he would beg us to take him
also, offering as his share, if he should be first to make his pile,
to pay the way for all of us. It was then that we three made the
compact which should be binding, that whenever our joint fortunes,
whether owned by one alone, or two, or in equal proportions by all
together, should amount to fifty thousand dollars, we would regard it
as common to us all, and, throwing up our workings, would leave the
Yukon for Guiana, in search of El Dorado. We were good comrades then,
and did not calculate what ruin the avarice of gain may bring about in
men.
"When spring came, we set out to seek the gold which should redeem us,
which lay just underground. All that summer we travelled and found
only pay-dirt or colours, and at times not even that, till we came to
the Sleeping River and pitched our camp at what was afterwards
Drunkman's Shallows. How discouraged we were! We talked of turning
back, saying that nothing of worth had ever been found in the Sleeping
River. We called ourselves fools for having wasted our time up there.
Then, on what we had determined should be the last night of our camp,
when we had made up our minds to return next day, Eric Petersen came
by and joined us. He also had found nothing; worse still, had spent
all he had, and, being down in the mouth, got drunk--not decently, but
gloriously intoxicated. Somewhere about midnight, when, after twenty
hours of shining, the sun had disappeared and the world was still
bright as day, and we were all sleeping, he got up and went down to
the river to bathe his aching head, and stumbled on the banks and,
falling in, was nearly drowned. You heard him cry and, waking, ran
down to the water's edge. As you stooped to pull him out, you saw
that, where his foot had stumbled on the bank, it had kicked up a
nugget. Then you roused us and, when we had prospected and found that
gold was really there, we each staked a claim, and you an extra one as
discoverer, and set off that same night on the run to register.
"It was on the evening of the day we recorded that you had your great
time at the Mascot, leading the singing, and being toasted all round.
It seemed to me I had reached El Dorado that night,--and now I know
that I never shall. So, after the fun was over, we went back to work
our claims, and toiled day and night till the river froze up. The
stampede had followed us, and every yard of likely land was staked for
miles below and above. My claim yielded next to nothing, and
Mordaunt's soon pinched out; but your two were the richest on the
Shallows.
"I was soon compelled to work for you for wages. Mordaunt, when he had
taken ten thousand dollars out of his claim, agreed to do likewise.
We should both have left you at that time and gone away to prospect
afresh, had it not been for our early understanding that whatever we
earned was owned conjointly. Just before the winter closed down upon
us, we had taken out nearly fifty thousand dollars, the figure at
which we had agreed to quit the Yukon; I had one, Mordaunt ten, and
you had thirty-five thousand dollars--forty-six thousand in all.
Mordaunt and I talked to you about selling out and starting on our
greater quest, but you held us to the fifty-thousand limit, saying
that six months' postponement more or less would make no difference,
and that we had better have too much than too little capital in hand
before our start was made. We yielded to your judgment inasmuch as you
were the richest man, never suspecting that you were already
contemplating going back on your bargain to share and share alike with
us.
"But after the burning had commenced, and the winter had settled down
for good, and the days had grown short and gloomy, we noticed a change
in your manner--one of which you, perhaps, were not fully conscious.
Your conversation became masterful and abrupt; you made us feel that
we were your hired men, and were no longer partners in a future and
nobler enterprise. Gradually the certainty dawned upon us that you had
repudiated your compact, and did not include us in your plans. Gold
for its own sake I had never cared about as you had; I only valued it
for the power it had to forward me in the quest of which I had dreamed
since I was a child--the following in my father's footsteps and
discovering of the city of the Incas, and, perhaps, of my father
himself.
"When I had seen you growing rich whilst I remained a poor man, I had
felt no jealousy; for I trusted in the promise we had exchanged and
relied on your honesty in keeping your word. But, when I had perceived
your new intention, something went wrong inside my brain, so that I
began to construe all your former good as bad. I thought that from the
first you had never intended to keep your word, and had brought me
into the Klondike to get me out of the way, so that, possessed of the
secret information which I had given you, you might steal a march on
me, and set out for El Dorado by yourself. Whether that was your
purpose I do not know; but, for doubting you, you can scarcely blame
me. So, day by day, as I descended the shaft to the bed-rock, and
piled up billets of wood, and kindled them, throwing out the muck,
drifting with the streak, sending up nuggets to the surface, and dirt
which often averaged ten dollars to the pan, I said to myself, 'Every
shovelful you dig out, and every fire you light, and every billet you
stack, is helping Spurling to betray you the earlier.'
"At first I would not believe my own judgment, but drove my anger down
by replying, 'He is no traitor; he is my friend.' But at night when I
came up, and you spoke to me pityingly about my hard luck and your own
increasing wealth, I knew what you meant. Mordaunt didn't seem to
mind; he had ten thousand dollars of his own, so he only said, 'Give
him time. He's all right. He'll remember and come round. His head's
turned for the moment by his fortune and he's lost his standards of
what is just. I daresay if this happened to you or me, we should have
been as bad.'
"But that did not comfort me much, for I thought, 'A man who can
betray and lie to you once, can always lie and betray.' I could not
sleep at night for thinking about it and I brooded over it all the
day; there was ever before my eyes the vision of you, sailing up the
Great Amana without me.
"If nothing else had happened and it had remained at that, I suppose I
should have finished my winter's contract with you and have gone out
again in the spring, either with Mordaunt or alone, prospecting for
myself. As it was, I began to argue with myself. 'What better right
has Spurling to this gold than I?' I said. 'If I had chosen this
claim, as I might have done, all the wealth which is now his would
have been mine. Had that been the case, I should have held to my
bargain and have dealt squarely by him. Since he refuses to allow me
the share which he promised me, I have a right to take it.'
"You know what followed, how I hid some nuggets in my shirt, and you
accused me and discovered them. You called me a thief, and threatened
to expose me to the law of the mining camp. I told you that, since we
had made that agreement to share conjointly whatever we found, I had
as big a right to take charge of some of the gold as you yourself.
Then you laughed in my face and struck me, asking if that was the
usual way in which a labourer spoke to his employer. That blow drove
me mad. I made no reply, for I had become suddenly crafty; I awaited a
revenge that was certain and from which there could be no rebound.
From that day forward the lust to kill was upon me; wherever I looked
I saw you dead, and was glad. When the Northern Lights shot up they
seemed to me, instead of green or yellow, to be always crimson, the
bloodcolour. When they crept and rustled through the snow along the
mountain heights, I fancied that they were a band of murderers who
fled from their crime, and turned, and beckoned, and pointed to me,
and whispered 'Come.' As my imagination wrought within me I grew
silent; not even Mordaunt could rouse me. But he guessed what was
happening, and would often come to me and say, 'Don't get
down-hearted. Whatever Spurling does, I still hold to my promise. You
and I are partners with a common fund. We have eleven thousand dollars
already, so cheer up.'
"But it wasn't envy of your wealth had driven me mad; it was fear lest
you should go off and leave me behind, and should get to Guiana and to
El Dorado first. I couldn't shake off my hallucination however much I
tried--which wasn't much; always and everywhere I could see you dead.
You know that the Klondike with its few hours of winter daylight, its
interminable nights, its pale-green moon which seems to shine forever
in a steely cloudless sky, and its three long months when men rarely
see the sun, is not a much better place than Keewatin in which to heal
a crippled mind. So, with the passage of time, there was worse to
come.
"One morning as I came to the shaft, I found a stranger waiting there.
It was dark, I could not see his face; since he said nothing, I passed
him and, descending to the bed-rock, commenced to scatter the last
night's burning that I might get at the thawed-out muck. Presently I
heard the sound of someone following, and the creak of the rope as he
let himself down in the bucket. I thought it was you, so I did not
turn, but sulkily went on with my work. The footsteps came after me
wherever I went, standing behind me. At last I swung round in anger,
supposing that you had come to torment me; at that moment I had it in
my heart to strike you dead. In the light of the scattered fire, I
discovered that it was not you, but instead a man of about my height
and breadth. 'What d'you want?' I asked him. He did not answer. 'Who
sent you here?' I said. He was silent. Then I grew frightened; seizing
a smouldering brand, having puffed it to a blaze, I thrust it before
his face--and saw _myself_.
"I was down there all alone and underground; no one could have heard
me had I cried for help. In my terror I grew foolish and laughed
aloud; _it seemed to me so odd that I should have such fear of
myself_. When I had grown quiet, 'Who sent you here?' I asked again.
"At last he answered, 'You called me.'
"'What have you come for?' I questioned.
"'To murder Spurling,' he replied.
"Then in a choking whisper I muttered, 'Who are you?'
"And he answered me, 'Your baser self.'
"I looked for a way of escape, but he stood between me and the mouth
of the shaft; to get out I would have had to pass him. I tried to make
him speak with me again that I might draw him aside, and so might slip
past him and get above ground; but he refused to stir. Then I grew
fascinated, and went near him, and peered into his face. He was like
me, yet unlike; he was more evil--what I might become at my worst. He
was to me what you were, when you just now arrived, to the man whom I
loved in London, and who saved my life in Tagish Lake. Having studied
his body and his face I loathed him, and drew myself away to the
farthest hiding-place. There I crouched beside the gold streak for
ten hours until the last glow of fire had died out, and I was left in
darkness. Then, though I could not see him, I knew that he was there.
"At last Mordaunt came and called to me. I begged him to come down.
Thinking I was wounded, he lit a lantern and descended in haste. As he
approached, I looked to see where _myself_ had been standing; but,
though I had felt him there the moment before, directly Mordaunt came
he vanished. In my horror I told Mordaunt everything--and what do you
think the little fellow did? Instead of laughing at me, or fleeing
from me for his life because I was mad, he set down his lamp and,
throwing his arms about me, knelt down there on the bed-rock and
prayed. If it hadn't been for Mordaunt I should certainly have killed
you in the days which followed. Whenever I was alone or in your
company, that thing, which was my baser self, was there. He would
stand behind you, so that you could not see him, with his hand
upraised as if about to strike. He would beckon to me that I also
should get behind you, and when you spoke to me contemptuously or
harshly the evil of his face would reflect a like passion in me
against you. But whenever Mordaunt was present he vanished, and I had
rest from temptation; therefore I say that Mordaunt saved you.
"I kept on hoping that when spring came I would be able to leave, and
thus rid myself of my evil dread; but the longer I stayed the greater
grew my peril. At length the crisis came.
"You had been down river across the ice to Dawson on the spree and to
arrange for the carriage of your bullion to Seattle. It was night, and
I was just returning from the shaft, where I had been giving a last
look to the burning. I had a rifle in my hand, and, as I arrived at
the door of the cabin, raising my eyes, saw you coming up-stream with
your dogs, with your head bent low as if you were tired. Also I saw in
the moonlight that _that other_ was noiselessly following you, stride
by stride, stealing up behind. I saw him waving his arms to me,
gesticulating madly and signing to me to kneel down and fire.
"Suddenly all power of resistance left me; with my eyes upon his face,
the memory of all the wrongs which you had dealt me, and my hatred of
you, swam uppermost in my mind. I knelt down in the snow to take
steadier aim and had my finger on the trigger, when the gun was
snatched from behind. I turned fiercely round and found Mordaunt
standing there. 'Quick,' he said, 'come inside.' He thrust the rifle
beneath a pile of furs, and bade me tumble into my bunk and pretend
sleep. Shortly after, I heard you come in and say that one of your
dogs had been shot dead; but I did not stir. You came over and gazed
down suspiciously at me, but seemed satisfied with Mordaunt's account
of how I had been lying there for the past two hours wearied out with
the day's work. Next day I could not look you in the eyes; also the
memory of a woman I had loved had come suddenly back and changed me,
making me ashamed. So two nights later I gathered together the few
things I had and, abandoning my claim, fled.
"If I could not trust myself with you, I could not trust myself in the
Yukon. Every miner travelling with gold seemed to me a possible victim
for my crime. I went about in fear lest I should see that evil thing,
which called himself _myself_, returning to keep me company through
life. I fled to escape him and, hoping to leave him behind me in the
Klondike, went over the winter trail to Skaguay, the route by which
two years earlier we had fought our way up, took steamer to Vancouver
and came on thence to Winnipeg. My money was all but exhausted when I
got there, I was broken in spirit and at my wit's end. By chance I met
with Wrath, on whose claim in our first winter we had worked. He had
gone back to his independent trading, and, at my request for
employment, sent me up here to look after his interests at Murder
Point. I was glad to come; after my experience on the Sleeping River,
I was distrustful of myself in the company of men, never knowing when
that _foreshadowing of my evil desires_ might not return to hound me
on to fresh villainies and despair. For one who wished to be alone,
Heaven knows, I chose well. You're not burdened with too much society
in Keewatin--that isn't the complaint which is most often heard."
Outside the night had long since settled down--a night which with snow
and starlight was not dark, but shadowy and ghostlike, making the
interval between two days a long-protracted dusk beneath which it was
possible to see for miles. Far away in the forest a timber-wolf howled
dismally; the huskies in the river-bed, seated on their haunches,
lifted up their heads and echoed his complaint. Then all was still
again, nothing was audible except the occasional low booming of the
ice, when a crack rent its path across the surface and far below the
river shook its gyves, as though clapping its hands in expectation of
the freedom of the spring to come.
Against the window the silhouette of Spurling loomed up, with the
drifting dimness of the starlight for background, and the square of
surrounding darkness for a frame of sombre plush; he seemed a
man-portrait whom some painter had condemned forever to motionlessness
and silence with the magic of his brush, and had nailed on a
stretcher, and had hung up for ornament.
At last he turned his head and stared into the blackness of the room,
searching with his eyes for Granger. "So the deed which you feared to
do, I have done," he said. "And here we sit together again, now that
three years have passed; I, the man whom you hoped to murder and the
man who has committed your crime; you, the man who stole from me,
fired on me, missed aim, and ran away, and yet who at this present
time are my judge. It is very strange! One would have supposed that
with the breadth of a continent between us, you in Keewatin, I in
Yukon, we need never have met. There is a meaning in this happening;
God intends that you should help me to escape."