CAMILLO BILL AVERTS A STAMPEDE
Late the following afternoon the festivities at the Golden North Saloon
were once more in full swing. The moccasined feet of the dancers softly
scraped the floor, there was not an empty chair to be had at the poker
tables, and the crowd that encircled a certain table at the back of the
room bespoke play of more than passing interest at the roulette wheel.
Horse Face Joe clung with one hand to the bar and voiced in maudlin
tones his desire that the other occupants of the room should each and
several join him thither.
The door swung violently open, and into this moil of frivolity burst
Old Man Gordon, his eyes wide with excitement, his long woolen scarf
trailing the floor in his wake, his coat open, and one mittened hand
clutching in a vicelike grip a small mooseskin bag. So precipitous had
been his entry that he had not stopped to remove his snow shoes, the
tails of which dragged noisily across the wooden floor.
“Shut the door!”
“Was you raised in a saw mill?”
“He was raised on a side hill where the doors shut theirselves!”
These, and other railings from the assembled crowd fell unheeded upon
Gordon’s ears. Someone else closed the door as the old man clattered to
the bar.
“What did I tell ye?” he cried, his voice pitched high with excitement,
“What did I tell ye right here in this room? Crowd up here ye malamutes
an’ look at gold!” As he spoke his mittened hand brought the sack down
upon the bar with a thud, “Weigh her up! Weigh her up an’ tell me I
ain’t dreamin’! Thirty-two ounces, my scales says--five hundred an’
twelve dollars! Every grain of it out of one pan, an’ I ain’t only six
foot down!”
Chairs overturned as the players of poker leaped from their seats. The
music stopped and men and women surged in from the dance room, and from
the roulette wheel, to crowd excitedly about the bar. McCarty, himself,
weighed the gold.
“Thirty-two ounces is right,” he announced, in a voice that despite
himself, trembled slightly. Silence greeted McCarty’s words, a silence
that the heavy breathing only seemed to accentuate, as three and four
deep, the men and women crowded the bar, their eyes on the yellow
gold. Of all the people in the room, only Camillo Bill remained in his
chair at a poker table, a grim smile upon his face as his fingers idly
riffled a deck of cards.
The voice of Horse Face Joe broke thickly upon the silence: “What in
hell y’all gawpin’ at? I got more dust’n that. Here, Mac, weigh mine
up. An’ I’ll spend ’er too. Ol’ Man Gordon, he wouldn’t never set ’em
up to the house.”
The silence broken, a perfect babble of voices burst forth. Everyone
was talking at once, and above the din rose the strident voice of
Gordon: “An’ only last night I offered to risk the claim agin ten
thousan’ dollars! Where’s MacShane?”
“How’d you happen to be workin’ today, anyhow,” inquired
Ace-In-The-Hole Brent, “Was it a hunch?”
“A hunch! A hunch, d’ye say? Aye, it was a hunch! A hunch that said I
was broke, an’ if I wanted maybe a wee bit tipple, or a bite to eat for
the woman an’ the little lass, I’d better be gougin’ gravel.”
“Hell, man, you could have got all you wanted in dust or liquor right
here!” exclaimed McCarty.
“Aye, Mac, I know,” retorted the canny Scot, “But, ’twould have to be
paid back. ’Twould be burnin’ the candle at both ends, as the Gude Book
says. If I was here borrowin’, I’d be loafin’ an’ spendin’, an’ if I
was out there in the gravel I wouldn’t be spendin’ an’ what I got would
be mine, an’ nothin’ to pay back later. As it is, I owe no man.”
“Go on! Go on!” came from a dozen throats, “It ain’t a sermon we want,
it’s facts!”
“An’ so,” continued Gordon, without deigning to notice the
interruption, “I hit out gude an’ early this mornin’ for the claim,
hopin’ to pan out an ounce, maybe two, afore night. I built a gude
fire in the shaft, an’ in the shack I melted the ice, an’ it was
along about noon I brought up my first bucket of gravel and carried
it into the shack. But ’twas not till I finished washin’ that I had
any idee what I’d got!” His voice, which had subsided into something
of its normal tones as he talked, again leaped into the falsetto of
excitement. “Ye should have be’n there to see for ye’re selves--when
the last bit of muddy water sloshed from the pan! There was no gravel
to be seen. Yellow gold--spread even, an’ thick! ’Twas like peerin’
into a firkin of butter! Losh! I squatted there like a daftie, starin’
down into the pan--a minute--ten minutes--mebbe an hour. I had no heed
of time. Then I weighed up, an’ my hands was shakin’ so at first I
bungled the job. There was flour gold in that pan that I didn’t get.
It’s layin’ back there on the floor of the shack. I got what I could
in the sack at last, an’ then I started fer here. I’d got mebbe it’s
twenty rod before I bogged down in the snow, an’ I noticed I’d forgot
my snowshoes, an’ I had to waller back an’ get ’em.”
Across the room Camillo Bill paused in the riffling of the cards, and
regarded the close-packed crowd with a twisted grin: “You c’n take ’em
off now, Gordon. Mac’s floor is toler’ble solid. You won’t bog down
here.”
“An’ only last night,” quavered Gordon, “I offered to risk the claim
agin ten thousan’! Where’s MacShane? Where’s the man that wouldn’t put
up ten thousan’ agin a claim ’twould have paid him out in the first
twenty pans?”
From his seat at the table Camillo Bill surveyed the scene with
interest. He noted that no one was paying any attention to Gordon, now.
Noted, also, a certain restlessness, a tenseness that seemed to fill
the air, and manifested itself in the quick tying of cap strings, and
the nervous buttoning of coats. Several of the girls who had slipped
away unobserved, reappeared at the foot of the stairs, dressed for the
trail. Here and there, men were drawing on parkas.
“I’d ort to let ’em go ahead an’ stampede their fool heads off,”
grinned Camillo Bill to himself.
“’Bout half of ’em thinks MacShane played it low down on Gordon, an’ it
would serve ’em right.”
There was a sudden concerted rush for the door, a rush that seemed to
include every man and woman in the room except Gordon, and Horse Face
Joe, who, clutching the bar, blinked in maudlin solemnity as he vainly
tried to sense the purport of what was going on about him. Even the
bartenders had torn off their white aprons and were frenziedly donning
coats, caps, and mittens.
“_Hold on!_” The voice of Camillo Bill rang sharp as the crack of a dog
whip. At the door the leaders paused, and as a man, the crowd whirled
to face the speaker. Camillo Bill was standing, now, and the twisted
smile had widened. The voice of Old Man Gordon cut the tense air thinly:
“’Twas the hand of God rewardin’ me for tryin’ to bring the Philistine
into the fold, even though I failed.”
“It was the hand of Burr MacShane!” roared Camillo Bill, “Tryin’ to
learn you to leave cards to them that knows somethin’ about ’em! You
won’t wash no ten thousan’ out of yer first twenty pans, neither.
You’ll wash thirty-seven hundred out of ’em--that’s what you’ll
wash--besides what little was in the gravel before MacShane salted it.”
“Salted it!”
“What d’you mean--salted it?”
“What in hell’s comin’ off here?” The crowd surged back, only this time
Camillo Bill, and not Gordon, was the center of interest.
“What are you talkin’ about?”
“Speak up, can’t you?”
“What in hell was MacShane doin’ saltin’ Gordon’s claim?”
Camillo Bill’s eyes caught the eyes of Moosehide Charlie. For a moment
their glances held, and in that moment, the latter seemed somehow to
shrink back, as though he had suddenly divined what was passing in
Camillo’s brain.
“I would shrivel if I was you, Moosehide. But, MacShane ain’t holdin’
it against you. He’s too big a man fer that. It’ll learn you mebbe,
not to go off half cocked, the same way it’ll mebbe learn Gordon that
gamblin’ is gamblin’ whether it’s poker or cribbage.” He paused and
allowed his eyes to sweep the crowd of faces before him. “Most of you
thought like Moosehide, that the reason MacShane wanted to hit out
for Gordon’s claim was so he could size up whether she was worth ten
thousan’. Instead of that, he drops down into Gordon’s shaft, an’ he
pulls out them sacks, an’ goes to work an’ salts every last speck an’
grain of the dust he win from Gordon back into the gravel. ‘It’s fer
the woman an’ the little kid,’ he says, ‘They need it, an’ I don’t.’
That’s what he says. An’ then he says, ‘You don’t need to say nothin’
to nobody about this. Only don’t go bustin’ up here on no stampede if
the old man claims he’s washed four or five hundred dollars to the
pan.’”
In the silence that followed, Moosehide Charlie started for the door.
“Where you goin’, Moosehide?” called Camillo Bill.
The other turned: “I’m headin’ fer MacShane’s,” he answered.
“An’ I’m with ye!” cried Gordon, who had listened, open-mouthed, to
the recital, “Losh, what a fool a man can make of himself onct he gets
started!”
“I’d ort to let you both go,” grinned Camillo Bill, “The trip would do
you good. But, the fact is, MacShane ain’t out to his claim.”
“Ain’t to his claim! Where is he, then?”
“He’s hit the trail. He’s kissed the Yukon good bye. Last night while
_chechakos_ like us was sleepin’ MacShane was a-borin’ a hole through
the dark.”
“Gone!”
“Pulled out!”
“An’ him takin’ out over a hundred dollars to the pan!”
“Where’s he gone?”
“You don’t mean he’s gone--outside! MacShane quit the North?” Questions
and exclamations hurled themselves at Camillo Bill from half a hundred
throats, so that it was some moments before he could make himself
heard; “No, he ain’t gone outside. MacShane won’t never go outside. He
just naturally got homesick for to hit the trail, an’ he pulled. It’s
gettin’ too crowded for MacShane down here. He hit North.”
“But his claim?” cried Bettles, “What about his claim?”
“We pooled our claims before he left,” said Camillo. “I’m workin’ ’em
both. We’re pardners.”