Lon McFane was a bit grumpy, what of losing his tobacco pouch, or else he
might have told me, before we got to it, something about the cabin at
Surprise Lake. All day, turn and turn about, we had spelled each other
at going to the fore and breaking trail for the dogs. It was heavy
snowshoe work, and did not tend to make a man voluble, yet Lon McFane
might have found breath enough at noon, when we stopped to boil coffee,
with which to tell me. But he didn’t. Surprise Lake?--it was Surprise
Cabin to me. I had never heard of it before. I confess I was a bit
tired. I had been looking for Lon to stop and make camp any time for an
hour; but I had too much pride to suggest making camp or to ask him his
intentions; and yet he was my man, lured at a handsome wage to mush my
dogs for me and to obey my commands. I guess I was a bit grumpy myself.
He said nothing, and I was resolved to ask nothing, even if we tramped on
all night.
We came upon the cabin abruptly. For a week of trail we had met no one,
and, in my mind, there had been little likelihood of meeting any one for
a week to come. And yet there it was, right before my eyes, a cabin,
with a dim light in the window and smoke curling up from the chimney.
“Why didn’t you tell me—” I began, but was interrupted by Lon, who
muttered—
“Surprise Lake—it lies up a small feeder half a mile on. It’s only a
pond.”
“Yes, but the cabin—who lives in it?”
“A woman,” was the answer, and the next moment Lon had rapped on the
door, and a woman’s voice bade him enter.
“Have you seen Dave recently?” she asked.
“Nope,” Lon answered carelessly. “I’ve been in the other direction, down
Circle City way. Dave’s up Dawson way, ain’t he?”
The woman nodded, and Lon fell to unharnessing the dogs, while I unlashed
the sled and carried the camp outfit into the cabin. The cabin was a
large, one-room affair, and the woman was evidently alone in it. She
pointed to the stove, where water was already boiling, and Lon set about
the preparation of supper, while I opened the fish-bag and fed the dogs.
I looked for Lon to introduce us, and was vexed that he did not, for they
were evidently old friends.
“You are Lon McFane, aren’t you?” I heard her ask him. “Why, I remember
you now. The last time I saw you it was on a steamboat, wasn’t it? I
remember . . . ”
Her speech seemed suddenly to be frozen by the spectacle of dread which,
I knew, from the tenor I saw mounting in her eyes, must be on her inner
vision. To my astonishment, Lon was affected by her words and manner.
His face showed desperate, for all his voice sounded hearty and genial,
as he said—
“The last time we met was at Dawson, Queen’s Jubilee, or Birthday, or
something—don’t you remember?—the canoe races in the river, and the
obstacle races down the main street?”
The terror faded out of her eyes and her whole body relaxed. “Oh, yes, I
do remember,” she said. “And you won one of the canoe races.”
“How’s Dave been makin’ it lately? Strikin’ it as rich as ever, I
suppose?” Lon asked, with apparent irrelevance.
She smiled and nodded, and then, noticing that I had unlashed the bed
roll, she indicated the end of the cabin where I might spread it. Her
own bunk, I noticed, was made up at the opposite end.
“I thought it was Dave coming when I heard your dogs,” she said.
After that she said nothing, contenting herself with watching Lon’s
cooking operations, and listening the while as for the sound of dogs
along the trail. I lay back on the blankets and smoked and watched.
Here was mystery; I could make that much out, but no more could I make
out. Why in the deuce hadn’t Lon given me the tip before we arrived? I
looked at her face, unnoticed by her, and the longer I looked the harder
it was to take my eyes away. It was a wonderfully beautiful face,
unearthly, I may say, with a light in it or an expression or something
“that was never on land or sea.” Fear and terror had completely
vanished, and it was a placidly beautiful face—if by “placid” one can
characterize that intangible and occult something that I cannot say was a
radiance or a light any more than I can say it was an expression.
Abruptly, as if for the first time, she became aware of my presence.
“Have you seen Dave recently?” she asked me. It was on the tip of my
tongue to say “Dave who?” when Lon coughed in the smoke that arose from
the sizzling bacon. The bacon might have caused that cough, but I took
it as a hint and left my question unasked. “No, I haven’t,” I answered.
“I’m new in this part of the country—”
“But you don’t mean to say,” she interrupted, “that you’ve never heard of
Dave—of Big Dave Walsh?”
“You see,” I apologised, “I’m new in the country. I’ve put in most of my
time in the Lower Country, down Nome way.”
“Tell him about Dave,” she said to Lon.
Lon seemed put out, but he began in that hearty, genial manner that I had
noticed before. It seemed a shade too hearty and genial, and it
irritated me.
“Oh, Dave is a fine man,” he said. “He’s a man, every inch of him, and
he stands six feet four in his socks. His word is as good as his bond.
The man lies who ever says Dave told a lie, and that man will have to
fight with me, too, as well—if there’s anything left of him when Dave
gets done with him. For Dave is a fighter. Oh, yes, he’s a scrapper
from way back. He got a grizzly with a ’38 popgun. He got clawed some,
but he knew what he was doin’. He went into the cave on purpose to get
that grizzly. ’Fraid of nothing. Free an’ easy with his money, or his
last shirt an’ match when out of money. Why, he drained Surprise Lake
here in three weeks an’ took out ninety thousand, didn’t he?” She
flushed and nodded her head proudly. Through his recital she had
followed every word with keenest interest. “An’ I must say,” Lon went
on, “that I was disappointed sore on not meeting Dave here to-night.”
Lon served supper at one end of the table of whip-sawed spruce, and we
fell to eating. A howling of the dogs took the woman to the door. She
opened it an inch and listened.
“Where is Dave Walsh?” I asked, in an undertone.
“Dead,” Lon answered. “In hell, maybe. I don’t know. Shut up.”
“But you just said that you expected to meet him here to-night,” I
challenged.
“Oh, shut up, can’t you,” was Lon’s reply, in the same cautious
undertone.
The woman had closed the door and was returning, and I sat and meditated
upon the fact that this man who told me to shut up received from me a
salary of two hundred and fifty dollars a month and his board.
Lon washed the dishes, while I smoked and watched the woman. She seemed
more beautiful than ever—strangely and weirdly beautiful, it is true.
After looking at her steadfastly for five minutes, I was compelled to
come back to the real world and to glance at Lon McFane. This enabled me
to know, without discussion, that the woman, too, was real. At first I
had taken her for the wife of Dave Walsh; but if Dave Walsh were dead, as
Lon had said, then she could be only his widow.
It was early to bed, for we faced a long day on the morrow; and as Lon
crawled in beside me under the blankets, I ventured a question.
“That woman’s crazy, isn’t she?”
“Crazy as a loon,” he answered.
And before I could formulate my next question, Lon McFane, I swear, was
off to sleep. He always went to sleep that way—just crawled into the
blankets, closed his eyes, and was off, a demure little heavy breathing
rising on the air. Lon never snored.
And in the morning it was quick breakfast, feed the dogs, load the sled,
and hit the trail. We said good-bye as we pulled out, and the woman
stood in the doorway and watched us off. I carried the vision of her
unearthly beauty away with me, just under my eyelids, and all I had to
do, any time, was to close them and see her again. The way was unbroken,
Surprise Lake being far off the travelled trails, and Lon and I took turn
about at beating down the feathery snow with our big, webbed shoes so
that the dogs could travel. “But you said you expected to meet Dave
Walsh at the cabin,” trembled on the tip of my tongue a score of times.
I did not utter it. I could wait until we knocked off in the middle of
the day. And when the middle of the day came, we went right on, for, as
Lon explained, there was a camp of moose hunters at the forks of the
Teelee, and we could make there by dark. But we didn’t make there by
dark, for Bright, the lead-dog, broke his shoulder-blade, and we lost an
hour over him before we shot him. Then, crossing a timber jam on the
frozen bed of the Teelee, the sled suffered a wrenching capsize, and it
was a case of make camp and repair the runner. I cooked supper and fed
the dogs while Lon made the repairs, and together we got in the night’s
supply of ice and firewood. Then we sat on our blankets, our moccasins
steaming on upended sticks before the fire, and had our evening smoke.
“You didn’t know her?” Lon queried suddenly. I shook my head.
“You noticed the colour of her hair and eyes and her complexion, well,
that’s where she got her name—she was like the first warm glow of a
golden sunrise. She was called Flush of Gold. Ever heard of her?”
Somewhere I had a confused and misty remembrance of having heard the
name, yet it meant nothing to me. “Flush of Gold,” I repeated; “sounds
like the name of a dance-house girl.” Lon shook his head. “No, she was
a good woman, at least in that sense, though she sinned greatly just the
same.”
“But why do you speak always of her in the past tense, as though she were
dead?”
“Because of the darkness on her soul that is the same as the darkness of
death. The Flush of Gold that I knew, that Dawson knew, and that Forty
Mile knew before that, is dead. That dumb, lunatic creature we saw last
night was not Flush of Gold.”
“And Dave?” I queried.
“He built that cabin,” Lon answered, “He built it for her . . . and for
himself. He is dead. She is waiting for him there. She half believes
he is not dead. But who can know the whim of a crazed mind? Maybe she
wholly believes he is not dead. At any rate, she waits for him there in
the cabin he built. Who would rouse the dead? Then who would rouse the
living that are dead? Not I, and that is why I let on to expect to meet
Dave Walsh there last night. I’ll bet a stack that I’d a been more
surprised than she if I _had_ met him there last night.”
“I do not understand,” I said. “Begin at the beginning, as a white man
should, and tell me the whole tale.”
And Lon began. “Victor Chauvet was an old Frenchman—born in the south of
France. He came to California in the days of gold. He was a pioneer.
He found no gold, but, instead, became a maker of bottled sunshine—in
short, a grape-grower and wine-maker. Also, he followed gold
excitements. That is what brought him to Alaska in the early days, and
over the Chilcoot and down the Yukon long before the Carmack strike. The
old town site of Ten Mile was Chauvet’s. He carried the first mail into
Arctic City. He staked those coal-mines on the Porcupine a dozen years
ago. He grubstaked Loftus into the Nippennuck Country. Now it happened
that Victor Chauvet was a good Catholic, loving two things in this world,
wine and woman. Wine of all kinds he loved, but of woman, only one, and
she was the mother of Marie Chauvet.”
Here I groaned aloud, having meditated beyond self-control over the fact
that I paid this man two hundred and fifty dollars a month.
“What’s the matter now?” he demanded.
“Matter?” I complained. “I thought you were telling the story of Flush
of Gold. I don’t want a biography of your old French wine-bibber.”
Lon calmly lighted his pipe, took one good puff, then put the pipe aside.
“And you asked me to begin at the beginning,” he said.
“Yes,” said I; “the beginning.”
“And the beginning of Flush of Gold is the old French wine-bibber, for he
was the father of Marie Chauvet, and Marie Chauvet was the Flush of Gold.
What more do you want? Victor Chauvet never had much luck to speak of.
He managed to live, and to get along, and to take good care of Marie, who
resembled the one woman he had loved. He took very good care of her.
Flush of Gold was the pet name he gave her. Flush of Gold Creek was
named after her—Flush of Gold town site, too. The old man was great on
town sites, only he never landed them.
“Now, honestly,” Lon said, with one of his lightning changes, “you’ve
seen her, what do you think of her—of her looks, I mean? How does she
strike your beauty sense?”
“She is remarkably beautiful,” I said. “I never saw anything like her in
my life. In spite of the fact, last night, that I guessed she was mad, I
could not keep my eyes off of her. It wasn’t curiosity. It was wonder,
sheer wonder, she was so strangely beautiful.”
“She was more strangely beautiful before the darkness fell upon her,” Lon
said softly. “She was truly the Flush of Gold. She turned all men’s
hearts . . . and heads. She recalls, with an effort, that I once won a
canoe race at Dawson—I, who once loved her, and was told by her of her
love for me. It was her beauty that made all men love her. She’d ’a’
got the apple from Paris, on application, and there wouldn’t have been
any Trojan War, and to top it off she’d have thrown Paris down. And now
she lives in darkness, and she who was always fickle, for the first time
is constant—and constant to a shade, to a dead man she does not realize
is dead.
“And this is the way it was. You remember what I said last night of Dave
Walsh—Big Dave Walsh? He was all that I said, and more, many times more.
He came into this country in the late eighties—that’s a pioneer for you.
He was twenty years old then. He was a young bull. When he was
twenty-five he could lift clear of the ground thirteen fifty-pound sacks
of flour. At first, each fall of the year, famine drove him out. It was
a lone land in those days. No river steamboats, no grub, nothing but
salmon bellies and rabbit tracks. But after famine chased him out three
years, he said he’d had enough of being chased; and the next year he
stayed. He lived on straight meat when he was lucky enough to get it; he
ate eleven dogs that winter; but he stayed. And the next winter he
stayed, and the next. He never did leave the country again. He was a
bull, a great bull. He could kill the strongest man in the country with
hard work. He could outpack a Chilcat Indian, he could outpaddle a
Stick, and he could travel all day with wet feet when the thermometer
registered fifty below zero, and that’s going some, I tell you, for
vitality. You’d freeze your feet at twenty-five below if you wet them
and tried to keep on.
“Dave Walsh was a bull for strength. And yet he was soft and
easy-natured. Anybody could do him, the latest short-horn in camp could
lie his last dollar out of him. ‘But it doesn’t worry me,’ he had a way
of laughing off his softness; ‘it doesn’t keep me awake nights.’ Now
don’t get the idea that he had no backbone. You remember about the bear
he went after with the popgun. When it came to fighting Dave was the
blamedest ever. He was the limit, if by that I may describe his
unlimitedness when he got into action, he was easy and kind with the
weak, but the strong had to give trail when he went by. And he was a man
that men liked, which is the finest word of all, a man’s man.
“Dave never took part in the big stampede to Dawson when Carmack made the
Bonanza strike. You see, Dave was just then over on Mammon Creek
strikin’ it himself. He discovered Mammon Creek. Cleaned eighty-four
thousand up that winter, and opened up the claim so that it promised a
couple of hundred thousand for the next winter. Then, summer bein’ on
and the ground sloshy, he took a trip up the Yukon to Dawson to see what
Carmack’s strike looked like. And there he saw Flush of Gold. I
remember the night. I shall always remember. It was something sudden,
and it makes one shiver to think of a strong man with all the strength
withered out of him by one glance from the soft eyes of a weak, blond,
female creature like Flush of Gold. It was at her dad’s cabin, old
Victor Chauvet’s. Some friend had brought Dave along to talk over town
sites on Mammon Creek. But little talking did he do, and what he did was
mostly gibberish. I tell you the sight of Flush of Gold had sent Dave
clean daffy. Old Victor Chauvet insisted after Dave left that he had
been drunk. And so he had. He was drunk, but Flush of Gold was the
strong drink that made him so.
“That settled it, that first glimpse he caught of her. He did not start
back down the Yukon in a week, as he had intended. He lingered on a
month, two months, all summer. And we who had suffered understood, and
wondered what the outcome would be. Undoubtedly, in our minds, it seemed
that Flush of Gold had met her master. And why not? There was romance
sprinkled all over Dave Walsh. He was a Mammon King, he had made the
Mammon Creek strike; he was an old sour dough, one of the oldest pioneers
in the land—men turned to look at him when he went by, and said to one
another in awed undertones, ‘There goes Dave Walsh.’ And why not? He
stood six feet four; he had yellow hair himself that curled on his neck;
and he was a bull—a yellow-maned bull just turned thirty-one.
“And Flush of Gold loved him, and, having danced him through a whole
summer’s courtship, at the end their engagement was made known. The fall
of the year was at hand, Dave had to be back for the winter’s work on
Mammon Creek, and Flush of Gold refused to be married right away. Dave
put Dusky Burns in charge of the Mammon Creek claim, and himself lingered
on in Dawson. Little use. She wanted her freedom a while longer; she
must have it, and she would not marry until next year. And so, on the
first ice, Dave Walsh went alone down the Yukon behind his dogs, with the
understanding that the marriage would take place when he arrived on the
first steamboat of the next year.
“Now Dave was as true as the Pole Star, and she was as false as a
magnetic needle in a cargo of loadstone. Dave was as steady and solid as
she was fickle and fly-away, and in some way Dave, who never doubted
anybody, doubted her. It was the jealousy of his love, perhaps, and
maybe it was the message ticked off from her soul to his; but at any rate
Dave was worried by fear of her inconstancy. He was afraid to trust her
till the next year, he had so to trust her, and he was pretty well beside
himself. Some of it I got from old Victor Chauvet afterwards, and from
all that I have pieced together I conclude that there was something of a
scene before Dave pulled north with his dogs. He stood up before the old
Frenchman, with Flush of Gold beside him, and announced that they were
plighted to each other. He was very dramatic, with fire in his eyes, old
Victor said. He talked something about ‘until death do us part’; and old
Victor especially remembered that at one place Dave took her by the
shoulder with his great paw and almost shook her as he said: ‘Even unto
death are you mine, and I would rise from the grave to claim you.’ Old
Victor distinctly remembered those words ‘Even unto death are you mine,
and I would rise from the grave to claim you.’ And he told me afterwards
that Flush of Gold was pretty badly frightened, and that he afterwards
took Dave to one side privately and told him that that wasn’t the way to
hold Flush of Gold—that he must humour her and gentle her if he wanted to
keep her.
“There is no discussion in my mind but that Flush of Gold was frightened.
She was a savage herself in her treatment of men, while men had always
treated her as a soft and tender and too utterly-utter something that
must not be hurt. She didn’t know what harshness was . . . until Dave
Walsh, standing his six feet four, a big bull, gripped her and pawed her
and assured her that she was his until death, and then some. And
besides, in Dawson, that winter, was a music-player—one of those
macaroni-eating, greasy-tenor-Eye-talian-dago propositions—and Flush of
Gold lost her heart to him. Maybe it was only fascination—I don’t know.
Sometimes it seems to me that she really did love Dave Walsh. Perhaps it
was because he had frightened her with that even-unto-death,
rise-from-the-grave stunt of his that she in the end inclined to the dago
music-player. But it is all guesswork, and the facts are, sufficient.
He wasn’t a dago; he was a Russian count—this was straight; and he wasn’t
a professional piano-player or anything of the sort. He played the
violin and the piano, and he sang—sang well—but it was for his own
pleasure and for the pleasure of those he sang for. He had money,
too—and right here let me say that Flush of Gold never cared a rap for
money. She was fickle, but she was never sordid.
“But to be getting along. She was plighted to Dave, and Dave was coming
up on the first steamboat to get her—that was the summer of ’98, and the
first steamboat was to be expected the middle of June. And Flush of Gold
was afraid to throw Dave down and face him afterwards. It was all
planned suddenly. The Russian music-player, the Count, was her obedient
slave. She planned it, I know. I learned as much from old Victor
afterwards. The Count took his orders from her, and caught that first
steamboat down. It was the _Golden Rocket_. And so did Flush of Gold
catch it. And so did I. I was going to Circle City, and I was
flabbergasted when I found Flush of Gold on board. I didn’t see her name
down on the passenger list. She was with the Count fellow all the time,
happy and smiling, and I noticed that the Count fellow was down on the
list as having his wife along. There it was, state-room, number, and
all. The first I knew that he was married, only I didn’t see anything of
the wife . . . unless Flush of Gold was so counted. I wondered if they’d
got married ashore before starting. There’d been talk about them in
Dawson, you see, and bets had been laid that the Count fellow had cut
Dave out.
“I talked with the purser. He didn’t know anything more about it than I
did; he didn’t know Flush of Gold, anyway, and besides, he was almost
rushed to death. You know what a Yukon steamboat is, but you can’t guess
what the _Golden Rocket_ was when it left Dawson that June of 1898. She
was a hummer. Being the first steamer out, she carried all the scurvy
patients and hospital wrecks. Then she must have carried a couple of
millions of Klondike dust and nuggets, to say nothing of a packed and
jammed passenger list, deck passengers galore, and bucks and squaws and
dogs without end. And she was loaded down to the guards with freight and
baggage. There was a mountain of the same on the fore-lower-deck, and
each little stop along the way added to it. I saw the box come aboard at
Teelee Portage, and I knew it for what it was, though I little guessed
the joker that was in it. And they piled it on top of everything else on
the fore-lower-deck, and they didn’t pile it any too securely either.
The mate expected to come back to it again, and then forgot about it. I
thought at the time that there was something familiar about the big husky
dog that climbed over the baggage and freight and lay down next to the
box. And then we passed the _Glendale_, bound up for Dawson. As she
saluted us, I thought of Dave on board of her and hurrying to Dawson to
Flush of Gold. I turned and looked at her where she stood by the rail.
Her eyes were bright, but she looked a bit frightened by the sight of the
other steamer, and she was leaning closely to the Count fellow as for
protection. She needn’t have leaned so safely against him, and I needn’t
have been so sure of a disappointed Dave Walsh arriving at Dawson. For
Dave Walsh wasn’t on the _Glendale_. There were a lot of things I didn’t
know, but was soon to know—for instance, that the pair were not yet
married. Inside half an hour preparations for the marriage took place.
What of the sick men in the main cabin, and of the crowded condition of
the _Golden Rocket_, the likeliest place for the ceremony was found
forward, on the lower deck, in an open space next to the rail and
gang-plank and shaded by the mountain of freight with the big box on top
and the sleeping dog beside it. There was a missionary on board, getting
off at Eagle City, which was the next step, so they had to use him quick.
That’s what they’d planned to do, get married on the boat.
“But I’ve run ahead of the facts. The reason Dave Walsh wasn’t on the
_Glendale_ was because he was on the _Golden Rocket_. It was this way.
After loiterin’ in Dawson on account of Flush of Gold, he went down to
Mammon Creek on the ice. And there he found Dusky Burns doing so well
with the claim, there was no need for him to be around. So he put some
grub on the sled, harnessed the dogs, took an Indian along, and pulled
out for Surprise Lake. He always had a liking for that section. Maybe
you don’t know how the creek turned out to be a four-flusher; but the
prospects were good at the time, and Dave proceeded to build his cabin
and hers. That’s the cabin we slept in. After he finished it, he went
off on a moose hunt to the forks of the Teelee, takin’ the Indian along.
“And this is what happened. Came on a cold snap. The juice went down
forty, fifty, sixty below zero. I remember that snap—I was at Forty
Mile; and I remember the very day. At eleven o’clock in the morning the
spirit thermometer at the N. A. T. & T. Company’s store went down to
seventy-five below zero. And that morning, near the forks of the Teelee,
Dave Walsh was out after moose with that blessed Indian of his. I got it
all from the Indian afterwards—we made a trip over the ice together to
Dyea. That morning Mr. Indian broke through the ice and wet himself to
the waist. Of course he began to freeze right away. The proper thing
was to build a fire. But Dave Walsh was a bull. It was only half a mile
to camp, where a fire was already burning. What was the good of building
another? He threw Mr. Indian over his shoulder—and ran with him—half a
mile—with the thermometer at seventy-five below. You know what that
means. Suicide. There’s no other name for it. Why, that buck Indian
weighed over two hundred himself, and Dave ran half a mile with him. Of
course he froze his lungs. Must have frozen them near solid. It was a
tomfool trick for any man to do. And anyway, after lingering horribly
for several weeks, Dave Walsh died.
“The Indian didn’t know what to do with the corpse. Ordinarily he’d have
buried him and let it go at that. But he knew that Dave Walsh was a big
man, worth lots of money, a _hi-yu skookum_ chief. Likewise he’d seen
the bodies of other _hi-yu skookums_ carted around the country like they
were worth something. So he decided to take Dave’s body to Forty Mile,
which was Dave’s headquarters. You know how the ice is on the grass
roots in this country—well, the Indian planted Dave under a foot of
soil—in short, he put Dave on ice. Dave could have stayed there a
thousand years and still been the same old Dave. You understand—just the
same as a refrigerator. Then the Indian brings over a whipsaw from the
cabin at Surprise Lake and makes lumber enough for the box. Also,
waiting for the thaw, he goes out and shoots about ten thousand pounds of
moose. This he keeps on ice, too. Came the thaw. The Teelee broke. He
built a raft and loaded it with the meat, the big box with Dave inside,
and Dave’s team of dogs, and away they went down the Teelee.
“The raft got caught on a timber jam and hung up two days. It was
scorching hot weather, and Mr. Indian nearly lost his moose meat. So
when he got to Teelee Portage he figured a steamboat would get to Forty
Mile quicker than his raft. He transferred his cargo, and there you are,
fore-lower deck of the _Golden Rocket_, Flush of Gold being married, and
Dave Walsh in his big box casting the shade for her. And there’s one
thing I clean forgot. No wonder I thought the husky dog that came aboard
at Teelee Portage was familiar. It was Pee-lat, Dave Walsh’s lead-dog
and favourite—a terrible fighter, too. He was lying down beside the box.
“Flush of Gold caught sight of me, called me over, shook hands with me,
and introduced me to the Count. She was beautiful. I was as mad for her
then as ever. She smiled into my eyes and said I must sign as one of the
witnesses. And there was no refusing her. She was ever a child, cruel
as children are cruel. Also, she told me she was in possession of the
only two bottles of champagne in Dawson—or that had been in Dawson the
night before; and before I knew it I was scheduled to drink her and the
Count’s health. Everybody crowded round, the captain of the steamboat,
very prominent, trying to ring in on the wine, I guess. It was a funny
wedding. On the upper deck the hospital wrecks, with various feet in the
grave, gathered and looked down to see. There were Indians all jammed in
the circle, too, big bucks, and their squaws and kids, to say nothing of
about twenty-five snarling wolf-dogs. The missionary lined the two of
them up and started in with the service. And just then a dog-fight
started, high up on the pile of freight—Pee-lat lying beside the big box,
and a white-haired brute belonging to one of the Indians. The fight
wasn’t explosive at all. The brutes just snarled at each other from a
distance—tapping at each other long-distance, you know, saying dast and
dassent, dast and dassent. The noise was rather disturbing, but you
could hear the missionary’s voice above it.
“There was no particularly easy way of getting at the two dogs, except
from the other side of the pile. But nobody was on that side—everybody
watching the ceremony, you see. Even then everything might have been all
right if the captain hadn’t thrown a club at the dogs. That was what
precipitated everything. As I say, if the captain hadn’t thrown that
club, nothing might have happened.
“The missionary had just reached the point where he was saying ‘In
sickness and in health,’ and ‘Till death us do part.’ And just then the
captain threw the club. I saw the whole thing. It landed on Pee-lat,
and at that instant the white brute jumped him. The club caused it.
Their two bodies struck the box, and it began to slide, its lower end
tilting down. It was a long oblong box, and it slid down slowly until it
reached the perpendicular, when it came down on the run. The onlookers
on that side the circle had time to get out from under. Flush of Gold
and the Count, on the opposite side of the circle, were facing the box;
the missionary had his back to it. The box must have fallen ten feet
straight up and down, and it hit end on.
“Now mind you, not one of us knew that Dave Walsh was dead. We thought
he was on the _Glendale_, bound for Dawson. The missionary had edged off
to one side, and so Flush of Gold faced the box when it struck. It was
like in a play. It couldn’t have been better planned. It struck on end,
and on the right end; the whole front of the box came off; and out swept
Dave Walsh on his feet, partly wrapped in a blanket, his yellow hair
flying and showing bright in the sun. Right out of the box, on his feet,
he swept upon Flush of Gold. She didn’t know he was dead, but it was
unmistakable, after hanging up two days on a timber jam, that he was
rising all right from the dead to claim her. Possibly that is what she
thought. At any rate, the sight froze her. She couldn’t move. She just
sort of wilted and watched Dave Walsh coming for her! And he got her.
It looked almost as though he threw his arms around her, but whether or
not this happened, down to the deck they went together. We had to drag
Dave Walsh’s body clear before we could get hold of her. She was in a
faint, but it would have been just as well if she had never come out of
that faint; for when she did, she fell to screaming the way insane people
do. She kept it up for hours, till she was exhausted. Oh, yes, she
recovered. You saw her last night, and know how much recovered she is.
She is not violent, it is true, but she lives in darkness. She believes
that she is waiting for Dave Walsh, and so she waits in the cabin he
built for her. She is no longer fickle. It is nine years now that she
has been faithful to Dave Walsh, and the outlook is that she’ll be
faithful to him to the end.”
Lon McFane pulled down the top of the blankets and prepared to crawl in.
“We have her grub hauled to her each year,” he added, “and in general
keep an eye on her. Last night was the first time she ever recognized
me, though.”
“Who are the we?” I asked.
“Oh,” was the answer, “the Count and old Victor Chauvet and me. Do you
know, I think the Count is the one to be really sorry for. Dave Walsh
never did know that she was false to him. And she does not suffer. Her
darkness is merciful to her.”