KAVIAK'S CRIME
"My little son, who look'd from thoughtful eyes,
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobey'd,
I struck him, and dismiss'd
With hard words and unkiss'd...."
Even with the plague and Brother Paul raging at the mission--even with
everyone preoccupied by the claims of dead and dying, the Boy would
have been glad to prolong his stay had it not been for "nagging"
thoughts of the Colonel. As it was, with the mercury rapidly rising and
the wind fallen, he got the Pymeuts on the trail next day at noon,
spent what was left of the night at the Kachime, and set off for camp
early the following day. He arrived something of a wreck, and with an
enormous respect for the Yukon trail.
It did him good to sight the big chimney, and still more to see the big
Colonel putting on his snow-shoes near the bottom of the hill, where
the cabin trail met the river trail. When the Boss o' the camp looked
up and saw the prodigal coming along, rather groggy on his legs, he
just stood still a moment. Then he kicked off his web-feet, turned back
a few paces uphill, and sat down on a spruce stump, folded his arms,
and waited. Was it the knapsack on his back that bowed him so?
"Hello, Kentucky!"
But the Colonel didn't look up till the Boy got quite near, chanting in
his tuneless voice:
"'Grasshoppah sett'n on a swee' p'tater vine,
Swee' p'tater vine, swee' p'tater vine--'"
"What's the matter, hey, Colonel? Sorry as all that to see me back?"
"Reckon it's the kind o' sorrah I can bear," said the Colonel. "We
thought you were dead."
"You ought t' known me better. Were you just sendin' out a rescue-party
of one?"
The Colonel nodded. "That party would have started before, but I cut my
foot with the axe the day you left. Where have you been, in the name o'
the nation?"
"Pymeut an' Holy Cross."
"Holy Cross? Holy Moses! _You?_"
"Yes; and do you know, one thing I saw there gave me a serious nervous
shock."
"That don't surprise me. What was it?"
"Sheets. When I came to go to bed--a real bed, Colonel, on legs--I
found I was expected to sleep between sheets, and I just about
fainted."
"That the only shock you had?"
"No, I had several. I saw an angel. I tell you straight, Colonel--you
can bank on what I'm sayin'--that Jesuit outfit's all right."
"Oh, you think so?" The rejoinder came a little sharply.
"Yes, sir, I just do. I think I'd be bigoted not to admit it."
"So, you'll be thick as peas in a pod with the priests now?"
"Well, I'm the one that can afford to be. They won't convert _me!_ And,
from my point o' view, it don't matter what a man is s' long's he's a
decent fella."
The Colonel's only answer was to plunge obliquely uphill.
"Say, Boss, wait for me."
The Colonel looked back. The Boy was holding on to a scrub willow that
put up wiry twigs above the snow.
"Feel as if I'd never get up the last rungs o' this darn ice-ladder!"
"Tired? H'm! Something of a walk to Holy Cross even on a nice mild day
like this." The Colonel made the reflection with obvious satisfaction,
took off his knapsack, and sat down again. The Boy did the same. "The
very day you lit out Father Orloff came up from the Russian mission."
"What's he like?"
"Oh, little fella in petticoats, with a beard an' a high pot-hat, like
a Russian. And that same afternoon we had a half-breed trader fella
here, with two white men. Since that day we haven't seen a human
creature. We bought some furs of the trader. Where'd you get yours?"
"Pymeut. Any news about the strike?"
"Well, the trader fella was sure it was all gammon, and told us stories
of men who'd sacrificed everything and joined a stampede, and got
sold--sold badly. But the two crazy whites with him--miners from
Dakotah--they were on fire about Minóok. Kept on bragging they hadn't
cold feet, and swore they'd get near to the diggins as their dogs'd
take 'em. The half-breed said they might do a hundred miles more, but
probably wouldn't get beyond Anvik."
"Crazy fools! I tell you, to travel even thirty miles on the Yukon in
winter, even with a bully team and old Nick to drive 'em, and not an
extra ounce on your back--I tell you, Colonel, it's no joke."
"B'lieve you, sonny."
It wasn't thirty seconds before sonny was adding: "Did that half-breed
think it was any use our trying to get dogs?"
"Ain't to be had now for love or money."
"Lord, Colonel, if we had a team--"
"Yes, I know. We'll probably owe our lives to the fact that we
haven't."
It suddenly occurred to the Boy that, although he had just done a
pretty good tramp and felt he'd rather die than go fifty feet further,
it was the Colonel who was most tired.
"How's everybody?"
"Oh, I s'pose we might all of us be worse off."
"What's the matter?"
He was so long answering that the Boy's eyes turned to follow the
serious outward gaze of the older man, even before he lifted one hand
and swept it down the hill and out across the dim, grey prospect.
"This," said the Colonel.
Their eyes had dropped down that last stretch of the steep snow slope,
across the two miles of frozen river, and ran half round the wide
horizon-line, like creatures in a cage. Whether they liked it or
whether they didn't, for them there was no way out.
"It's the awful stillness." The Colonel arraigned the distant
ice-plains.
They sat there looking, listening, as if they hoped their protest might
bring some signal of relenting. No creature, not even a crystal-coated
willow-twig, nothing on all the ice-bound earth stirred by as much as a
hair; no mark of man past or present broke the grey monotony; no sound
but their two voices disturbed the stillness of the world. It was a
quiet that penetrated, that pricked to vague alarm. Already both knew
the sting of it well.
"It's the kind of thing that gets on a fella's nerves," said the
Colonel. "I don't know as I ever felt helpless in any part of the world
before. But a man counts for precious little up here. Do you notice how
you come to listen to the silence?"
"Oh, yes, I've noticed."
"Stop." Again he lifted his hand, and they strained their ears. "I've
done that by the hour since you left and the daft gold-diggers went up
trail after you. The other fellas feel it, too. Don't know what we'd
have done without Kaviak. Think we ought to keep that kid, you know."
"I could get on without Kaviak if only we had some light. It's this
villainous twilight that gets into my head. All the same, you know"--he
stood up suddenly--"we came expecting to stand a lot, didn't we?"
The elder man nodded. "Big game, big stakes. It's all right."
Eventless enough after this, except for the passing of an Indian or
two, the days crawled by.
The Boy would get up first in the morning, rake out the dead ashes, put
on a couple of back-logs, bank them with ashes, and then build the fire
in front. He broke the ice in the water-bucket, and washed; filled
coffee-pot and mush-kettle with water (or ice), and swung them over the
fire; then he mixed the corn-bread, put it in the Dutch oven, covered
it with coals, and left it to get on with its baking. Sometimes this
part of the programme was varied by his mixing a hoe-cake on a board,
and setting it up "to do" in front of the fire. Then he would call the
Colonel--
"'Wake up Massa,
De day am breakin';
Peas in de pot, en de
Hoe-cake bakin''"--
for it was the Colonel's affair to take up proceedings at this
point--make the coffee and the mush and keep it from burning, fry the
bacon, and serve up breakfast.
Saturday brought a slight variation in the early morning routine. The
others came straggling in, as usual, but once a week Mac was sure to be
first, for he had to get Kaviak up. Mac's view of his whole duty to man
seemed to centre in the Saturday scrubbing of Kaviak. Vainly had the
Esquimer stood out against compliance with this most repulsive of
foreign customs. He seemed to be always ready with some deep-laid
scheme for turning the edge of Mac's iron resolution. He tried hiding
at the bottom of the bed. It didn't work. The next time he crouched far
back under the lower bunk. He was dragged out. Another Saturday he
embedded himself, like a moth, in a bundle of old clothes. Mac shook
him out. He had been very sanguine the day he hid in the library. This
was a wooden box nailed to the wall on the right of the door. Most of
the bigger books--Byron, Wordsworth, Dana's "Mineralogy," and two
Bibles--he had taken out and concealed in the lower bunk very
skilfully, far back behind the Colonel's feet. Copps's "Mining" and the
two works on "Parliamentary Law" piled at the end of the box served as
a pillow. After climbing in and folding himself up into an incredibly
small space, Kaviak managed with superhuman skill to cover himself
neatly with a patchwork quilt of _Munsey, Scribner, Century, Strand_,
and _Overland_ for August, '97. No one would suspect, glancing into
that library, that underneath the usual top layer of light reading, was
matter less august than Law, Poetry, Science, and Revelation.
It was the base Byron, tipping the wink to Mac out of the back of the
bunk, that betrayed Kaviak.
It became evident that "Farva" began to take a dour pride in the Kid's
perseverance. One morning he even pointed out to the camp the strong
likeness between Kaviak and Robert Bruce.
"No, sah; the Scottish chief had to have an object-lesson, but
Kaviak--Lawd!--Kaviak could give points to any spider livin'!"
This was on the morning that the Esquimer thought to escape scrubbing,
even at the peril of his life, by getting up on to the swing-shelf
--how, no man ever knew. But there he sat in terror, like a
very young monkey in a wind-rocked tree, hardly daring to breathe, his
arms clasped tight round the demijohn; but having Mac to deal with, the
end of it was that he always got washed, and equally always he seemed
to register a vow that, s'help him, Heaven! it should never happen
again.
After breakfast came the clearing up. It should have been done (under
this régime) by the Little Cabin men, but it seldom was. O'Flynn was
expected to keep the well-hole in the river chopped open and to bring
up water every day. This didn't always happen either, though to drink
snow-water was to invite scurvy, Father Wills said. There was also a
daily need, if the Colonel could be believed, for everybody to chop
firewood.
"We got enough," was Potts' invariable opinion.
"For how long? S'pose we get scurvy and can't work; we'd freeze to
death in a fortnight."
"Never saw a fireplace swalla logs whole an' never blink like this
one."
"But you got no objection to sittin' by while the log-swallerin' goes
on."
The Colonel or the Boy cooked the eternal beans, bacon and mush dinner,
after whatever desultory work was done; as a matter of fact, there was
extraordinarily little to occupy five able-bodied men. The fun of
snow-shoeing, mitigated by frostbite, quickly degenerated from a sport
into a mere means of locomotion. One or two of the party went hunting,
now and then, for the scarce squirrel and the shy ptarmigan. They
tried, with signal lack of success, to catch fish, Indian fashion,
through a hole in the ice.
But, for the most part, as winter darkened round them, they lounged
from morning till night about the big fireplace, and smoked, and
growled, and played cards, and lived as men do, finding out a deal
about each other's characters, something about each other's opinions,
and little or nothing about each other's history.
In the appalling stillness of the long Arctic night, any passer-by was
hailed with enthusiasm, and although the food-supply in the Big Cabin
was plainly going to run short before spring, no traveller--white,
Indian, or Esquimaux--was allowed to go by without being warmed and
fed, and made to tell where he came from and whither he was
bound--questions to tax the sage. Their unfailing hospitality was not
in the least unexpected or unusual, being a virtue practised even by
scoundrels in the great North-west; but it strained the resources of
the little camp, a fourth of whose outfit lay under the Yukon ice.
In the state of lowered vitality to which the poor, ill-cooked food,
the cold and lack of exercise, was slowly reducing them, they talked to
one another less and less as time went on, and more and more--silently
and each against his will--grew hyper-sensitive to the shortcomings and
even to the innocent "ways" of the other fellow.
Not Mac's inertia alone, but his trick of sticking out his jaw became
an offence, his rasping voice a torture. The Boy's occasional
ebullition of spirits was an outrage, the Colonel's mere size
intolerable. O'Flynn's brogue, which had amused them, grew to be just
part of the hardship and barbarism that had overtaken them like an evil
dream, coercing, subduing all the forces of life. Only Kaviak seemed
likely to come unscathed through the ordeal of the winter's captivity;
only he could take the best place at the fire, the best morsel at
dinner, and not stir angry passions; only he dared rouse Mac when the
Nova Scotian fell into one of his bear-with-a-sore-head moods. Kaviak
put a stop to his staring angrily by the hour into the fire, and set
him to whittling out boats and a top, thereby providing occupation for
the morrow, since it was one man's work to break Kaviak of spinning the
one on the table during mealtime, and sailing the other in the
drinking-water bucket at all times when older eyes weren't watching.
The Colonel wrote up his journal, and read the midsummer magazines and
Byron, in the face of Mac's "I do not like Byron's thought; I do not
consider him healthy or instructive." In one of his more energetic
moods the Colonel made a four-footed cricket for Kaviak, who preferred
it to the high stool, and always sat on it except at meals.
Once in a while, when for hours no word had been spoken except some
broken reference to a royal flush or a jack-pot, or O'Flynn had said,
"Bedad! I'll go it alone," or Potts had inquired anxiously, "Got the
joker? Guess I'm euchred, then," the Boy in desperation would catch up
Kaviak, balance the child on his head, or execute some other gymnastic,
soothing the solemn little heathen's ruffled feelings, afterwards, by
crooning out a monotonous plantation song. It was that kind of addition
to the general gloom that, at first, would fire O'Flynn to raise his
own spirits, at least, by roaring out an Irish ditty. But this was
seldomer as time went on. Even Jimmie's brogue suffered, and grew less
robust.
In a depressed sort of way Mac was openly teaching Kaviak his letters,
and surreptitiously, down in the Little Cabin, his prayers. He was very
angry when Potts and O'Flynn eavesdropped and roared at Kaviak's
struggles with "Ow Farva." In fact, Kaviak did not shine as a student
of civilisation, though that told less against him with O'Flynn, than
the fact that he wasn't "jolly and jump about, like white children."
Moreover, Jimmie, swore there was something "bogey" about the boy's
intermittent knowledge of English. Often for days he would utter
nothing but "Farva" or "Maw" when he wanted his plate replenished, then
suddenly he would say something that nobody could remember having
taught him or even said in his presence.
It was not to be denied that Kaviak loved sugar mightily, and stole it
when he could. Mac lectured him and slapped his minute yellow hands,
and Kaviak stole it all the same. When he was bad--that is, when he had
eaten his daily fill of the camp's scanty store (in such a little place
it was not easy to hide from such a hunter as Kaviak)--he was taken
down to the Little Cabin, smacked, and made to say "Ow Farva." Nobody
could discover that he minded much, though he learnt to try to shorten
the ceremony by saying "I solly" all the way to the cabin.
As a rule he was strangely undemonstrative; but in his own grave little
fashion he conducted life with no small intelligence, and learned, with
an almost uncanny quickness, each man's uses from the Kaviak point of
view. The only person he wasn't sworn friends with was the handy-man,
and there came to be a legend current in the camp, that Kaviak's first
attempt at spontaneously stringing a sentence under that roof was, "Me
got no use for Potts."
The best thing about Kaviak was that his was no craven soul. He was
obliged to steal the sugar because he lived with white people who were
bigger than he, and who always took it away when they caught him. But
once the sugar was safe under his shirt, he owned up without the
smallest hesitation, and took his smacking like a man. For the rest, he
flourished, filled out, and got as fat as a seal, but never a whit less
solemn.
One morning the Colonel announced that now the days had grown so short,
and the Trio were so late coming to breakfast, and nobody did any work
to speak of, it would be a good plan to have only two meals a day.
The motion was excessively unpopular, but it was carried by a plain,
and somewhat alarming, exposition of the state of supplies.
"We oughtn't to need as much food when we lazy round the fire all day,"
said the Colonel. But Potts retorted that they'd need a lot more if
they went on adoptin' the aborigines.
They knocked off supper, and all but the aborigine knew what it meant
sometimes to go hungry to bed.
Towards the end of dinner one day late in December, when everybody else
had finished except for coffee and pipe, the aborigine held up his
empty plate.
"Haven't you had enough?" asked the Colonel mildly, surprised at
Kaviak's bottomless capacity.
"Maw." Still the plate was extended.
"There isn't a drop of syrup left," said Potts, who had drained the
can, and even wiped it out carefully with halves of hot biscuit.
"He don't really want it."
"Mustn't open a fresh can till to-morrow."
"No, sir_ee_. We've only got--"
"Besides, he'll bust."
Kaviak meanwhile, during this paltry discussion, had stood up on the
high stool "Farva" had made for him, and personally inspected the big
mush-pot. Then he turned to Mac, and, pointing a finger like a straw
(nothing could fatten those infinitesimal hands), he said gravely and
fluently:
"Maw in de plenty-bowl."
"Yes, maw mush, but no maw syrup."
The round eyes travelled to the store corner.
"We'll have to open a fresh can some time--what's the odds?"
Mac got up, and not only Kaviak watched him--for syrup was a luxury not
expected every day--every neck had craned, every pair of eyes had
followed anxiously to that row of rapidly diminishing tins, all that
was left of the things they all liked best, and they still this side of
Christmas!
"What you rubber-neckin' about?" Mac snapped at the Boy as he came back
with the fresh supply. This unprovoked attack was ample evidence that
Mac was uneasy under the eyes of the camp, angry at his own weakness,
and therefore the readier to dare anybody to find fault with him.
"How can I help watchin' you?" said the Boy. Mac lifted his eyes
fiercely. "I'm fascinated by your winnin' ways; we're all like that."
Kaviak had meanwhile made a prosperous voyage to the plenty-bowl, and
returned to Mac's side--an absurd little figure in a strange
priest-like cassock buttoned from top to bottom (a waistcoat of Mac's),
and a jacket of the Boy's, which was usually falling off (and trailed
on the ground when it wasn't), and whose sleeves were rolled up in
inconvenient muffs. Still, with a gravity that did not seem impaired by
these details, he stood clutching his plate anxiously with both hands,
while down upon the corn-mush descended a slender golden thread,
manipulated with a fine skill to make the most of its sweetness. It
curled and spiralled, and described the kind of involved and
long-looped flourishes which the grave and reverend of a hundred years
ago wrote jauntily underneath the most sober names.
Lovingly the dark eyes watched the engrossing process. Even when the
attenuated thread was broken, and the golden rain descended in slow,
infrequent drops, Kaviak stood waiting, always for just one drop more.
"That's enough, greedy."
"Now go away and gobble."
But Kaviak daintily skimmed off the syrupy top, and left his mush
almost as high a hill as before.
It wasn't long after the dinner, things had been washed up, and the
Colonel settled down to the magazines--he was reading the
advertisements now--that Potts drew out his watch.
"Golly! do you fellers know what o'clock it is?" He held the open
timepiece up to Mac. "Hardly middle o' the afternoon. All these hours
before bedtime, and nothin' to eat till to-morrow!"
"Why, you've just finished--"
"But look at the _time!_"
The Colonel said nothing. Maybe he had been a little previous with
dinner today; it was such a relief to get it out of the way. Oppressive
as the silence was, the sound of Potts's voice was worse, and as he
kept on about how many hours it would be till breakfast, the Colonel
said to the Boy:
"'Johnny, get your gun,' and we'll go out."
In these December days, before the watery sun had set, the great,
rich-coloured moon arose, having now in her resplendent fulness quite
the air of snuffing out the sun. The pale and heavy-eyed day was put to
shame by this brilliant night-lamp, that could cast such heavy shadows,
and by which men might read.
The instant the Big Cabin door was opened Kaviak darted out between the
Colonel's legs, threw up his head like a Siwash dog, sniffed at the
frosty air and the big orange moon, flung up his heels, and tore down
to the forbidden, the fascinating fish-hole. If he hadn't got snared in
his trailing coat he would have won that race. When the two hunters had
captured Kaviak, and shut him indoors, they acted on his implied
suggestion that the fish-trap ought to be examined. They chopped away
the fresh-formed ice. Empty, as usual.
It had been very nice, and neighbourly, of Nicholas, as long ago as the
1st of December, to bring the big, new, cornucopia-shaped trap down on
his sled on the way to the Ikogimeut festival. It had taken a long time
to cut through the thick ice, to drive in the poles, and fasten the
slight fencing, in such relation to the mouth of the sunken trap, that
all well-conducted fish ought easily to find their way thither. As a
matter of fact, they didn't. Potts said it was because the Boy was
always hauling out the trap "to see"; but what good would it be to have
it full of fish and not know?
They had been out about an hour when the Colonel brought down a
ptarmigan, and said he was ready to go home. The Boy hesitated.
"Going to give in, and cook that bird for supper?"
It was a tempting proposition, but the Colonel said, rather sharply:
"No, sir. Got to keep him for a Christmas turkey."
"Well, I'll just see if I can make it a brace."
The Colonel went home, hung his trophy outside to freeze, and found the
Trio had decamped to the Little Cabin. He glanced up anxiously to see
if the demijohn was on the shelf. Yes, and Kaviak sound asleep in the
bottom bunk. The Colonel would climb up and have forty winks in the top
one before the Boy got in for their game of chess. He didn't know how
long he had slept when a faint scratching pricked through the veil of
slumber, and he said to himself, "Kaviak's on a raid again," but he was
too sodden with sleep to investigate. Just before he dropped off again,
however, opening a heavy eye, he saw Potts go by the bunk, stop at the
door and listen. Then he passed the bunk again, and the faint noise
recommenced. The Colonel dropped back into the gulf of sleep, never
even woke for his chess, and in the morning the incident had passed out
of his mind.
Just before dinner the next day the Boy called out:
"See here! who's spilt the syrup?"
"Spilt it?"
"Syrup?"
"No; it don't seem to be spilt, either." He patted the ground with his
hand.
"You don't mean that new can--"
"Not a drop in it." He turned it upside down.
Every eye went to Kaviak. He was sitting on his cricket by the fire
waiting for dinner. He returned the accusing looks of the company with
self-possession.
"Come here." He got up and trotted over to "Farva."
"Have you been to the syrup?"
Kaviak shook his head.
"You _must_ have been."
"No."
"You sure?"
He nodded.
"How did it go--all away--Do you know?"
Again the silent denial. Kaviak looked over his shoulder at the dinner
preparations, and then went back to his cricket. It was the best place
from which to keep a strict eye on the cook.
"The gintlemin don't feel conversaytional wid a pint o' surrup in his
inside."
"I tell you he'd be currled up with colic if he--"
"Well," said O'Flynn hopefully, "bide a bit. He ain't lookin' very
brash."
"Come here."
Kaviak got up a second time, but with less alacrity.
"Have you got a pain?"
He stared.
"Does it hurt you there?" Kaviak doubled up suddenly.
"He's awful ticklish," said the Boy.
Mac frowned with perplexity, and Kaviak retired to the cricket.
"Does the can leak anywhere?"
"That excuse won't hold water 'cause the can will." The Colonel had
just applied the test.
"Besides, it would have leaked on to something," Mac agreed.
"Oh, well, let's mosy along with our dinner," said Potts.
"It's gettin' pretty serious," remarked the Colonel. "We can't afford
to lose a pint o' syrup."
"No, _Siree_, we can't; but there's one thing about Kaviak," said the
Boy, "he always owns up. Look here, Kiddie: don't say no; don't shake
your head till you've thought. Now, think _hard_."
Kaviak's air of profound meditation seemed to fill every requirement.
"Did you take the awful good syrup and eat it up?"
Kaviak was in the middle of a head-shake when he stopped abruptly. The
Boy had said he wasn't to do that. Nobody had seemed pleased when he
said "No."
"I b'lieve we're on the right track. He's remembering. Think again. You
are a tip-top man at finding sugar, aren't you?"
"Yes, fin' shugh." Kaviak modestly admitted his prowess in that
direction.
"And you get hungry in the early morning?"
Yes, he would go so far as to admit that he did.
"You go skylarkin' about, and you remember--the syrup can! And you get
hold of it--didn't you?"
"To-malla."
"You mean yesterday--this morning?"
"N--"
"Sh!"
Kaviak blinked.
"Wait and think. Yesterday this was full. You remember Mac opened it
for you?"
Kaviak nodded.
"And now, you see"--he turned the can bottom side up--"all gone!"
"Oh-h!" murmured Kaviak with an accent of polite regret. Then, with
recovered cheerfulness, he pointed to the store corner: "Maw!"
Potts laughed in his irritating way, and Mac's face got red. Things
began to look black for Kaviak.
"Say, fellas, see here!" The Boy hammered the lid on the can with his
fist, and then held it out. "It was put away shut up, for I shut it,
and even one of us can't get that lid off without a knife or something
to pry it."
The company looked at the small hands doubtfully. They were none too
little for many a forbidden feat. How had he got on the swing-shelf?
How--
"Ye see, crayther, it must uv been yersilf, becuz there isn't annybuddy
else."
"Look here," said the Colonel, "we'll forgive you this time if you'll
own up. Just tell us--"
"Kaviak!" Again that journey from the cricket to the judgment-seat.
"Show us"--Mac had taken the shut tin, and now held it out--"show us
how you got the lid off."
But Kaviak turned away. Mac seized him by the shoulder and jerked him
round.
Everyone felt it to be suspicious that Kaviak was unwilling even to try
to open the all too attractive can. Was he really cunning, and did he
want not to give himself away? Wasn't he said to be much older than he
looked? and didn't he sometimes look a hundred, and wise for his years?
"See here: I haven't caught you in a lie yet, but if I do--"
Kaviak stared, drew a long breath, and seemed to retire within himself.
"You'd better attend to me, for I mean business."
Kaviak, recalled from internal communing, studied "Farva" a moment, and
then retreated to the cricket, as to a haven now, hastily and with
misgiving, tripping over his trailing coat. Mac stood up.
"Wait, old man." The Colonel stooped his big body till he was on a
level with the staring round eyes. "Yo' see, child, yo' can't have any
dinnah till we find out who took the syrup."
The little yellow face was very serious. He turned and looked at the
still smoking plenty-bowl.
"Are yoh hungry?"
He nodded, got up briskly, held up his train, and dragged his high
stool to the table, scrambled up, and established himself.
"Look at that!" said the Colonel triumphantly. "That youngster hasn't
just eaten a pint o' syrup."
Mac was coming slowly up behind Kaviak with a face that nobody liked
looking at.
"Oh, let the brat alone, and let's get to our grub!" said Potts, with
an extreme nervous irritation.
Mac swept Kaviak off the stool. "You come with me!"
Only one person spoke after that till the meal was nearly done. That
one had said, "Yes, Farva," and followed Mac, dinnerless, out to the
Little Cabin.
The Colonel set aside a plateful for each of the two absent ones, and
cleared away the things. Potts stirred the fire in a shower of sparks,
picked up a book and flung it down, searched through the sewing-kit for
something that wasn't lost, and then went to the door to look at the
weather--so he said. O'Flynn sat dozing by the fire. He was in the way
of the washing-up.
"Stir your stumps, Jimmie," said the Colonel, "and get us a bucket of
water." Sleepily O'Flynn gave it as his opinion that he'd be damned if
he did.
With unheard-of alacrity, "I'll go," said Potts.
The Colonel stared at him, and, by some trick of the brain, he had a
vision of Potts listening at the door the night before, and then
resuming that clinking, scratching sound in the corner--the store
corner.
"Hand me over my parki, will you?" Potts said to the Boy. He pulled it
over his head, picked up the bucket, and went out.
"Seems kind o' restless, don't he?"
"Yes. Colonel--"
"Hey?"
"Nothin'."
Ten minutes--a quarter of an hour went by.
"Funny Mac don't come for his dinner, isn't it? S'pose I go and look
'em up?"
"S'pose you do."
Not far from the door he met Mac coming in.
"Well?" said the Boy, meaning, Where's the kid?
"Well?" Mac echoed defiantly. "I lammed him, as I'd have lammed Robert
Bruce if he'd lied to me."
The Boy stared at this sudden incursion into history, but all he said
was: "Your dinner's waitin'."
The minute Mac got inside he looked round hungrily for the child. Not
seeing him, he went over and scrutinised the tumbled contents of the
bunks.
"Where's Kaviak?"
"P'raps you'll tell us."
"You mean he isn't here?" Mac wheeled round sharply.
"_Here?_"
"He didn't come back here for his dinner?"
"Haven't seen him since you took him out." Mac made for the door. The
Boy followed.
"Kaviak!" each called in turn. It was quite light enough to see if he
were anywhere about, although the watery sun had sunk full half an hour
before. The fantastically huge full-moon hung like a copper shield on a
steel-blue wall.
"Do you see anything?" whispered Mac.
"No."
"Who's that yonder?"
"Potts gettin' water."
The Boy was bending down looking for tracks. Mac looked, too, but
ineffectually, feverishly.
"Isn't Potts calling?"
"I knew he would if he saw us. He's never carried a bucket uphill yet
without help. See, there are the Kid's tracks going. We must find some
turned the other way."
They were near the Little Cabin now.
"Here!" shouted the Boy; "and ... yes, here again!" And so it was.
Clean and neatly printed in the last light snowfall showed the little
footprints. "We're on the right trail now. Kaviak!"
Through his parki the Boy felt a hand close vise-like on his shoulder,
and a voice, not like MacCann's:
"Goin' straight down to the fish-trap hole!"
The two dashed forward, down the steep hill, the Boy saying breathless
as they went: "And Potts--where's Potts?"
He had vanished, but there was no time to consider how or where.
"Kaviak!"
"Kaviak!" And as they got to the river:
"Think I hear--"
"So do I--"
"Coming! coming! Hold on tight! Coming, Kaviak!"
They made straight for the big open fish-hole. Farther away from the
Little Cabin, and nearer the bank, was the small well-hole. Between the
two they noticed, as they raced by, the water-bucket hung on that heavy
piece of driftwood that had frozen aslant in the river. Mac saw that
the bucket-rope was taut, and that it ran along the ice and disappeared
behind the big funnel of the fish-trap.
The sound was unmistakable now--a faint, choked voice calling out of
the hole, "Help!"
"Coming!"
"Hold tight!"
"Half a minute!"
And how it was done or who did it nobody quite knew, but Potts, still
clinging by one hand to the bucket-rope, was hauled out and laid on the
ice before it was discovered that he had Kaviak under his arm--Kaviak,
stark and unconscious, with the round eyes rolled back till one saw the
whites and nothing more.
Mac picked the body up and held it head downwards; laid it flat again,
and, stripping off the great sodden jacket, already beginning to
freeze, fell to putting Kaviak through the action of artificial
breathing.
"We must get them up to the cabin first thing," said the Boy.
But Mac seemed not to hear.
"Don't you see Kaviak's face is freezing?"
Still Mac paid no heed. Potts lifted a stiff, uncertain hand, and, with
a groan, let it fall heavily on his own cheek.
"Come on; I'll help you in, anyhow, Potts."
"Can't walk in this damned wet fur."
With some difficulty having dragged off Potts' soaked parki, already
stiffening unmanageably, the Boy tried to get him on his feet.
"Once you're in the cabin you're all right."
But the benumbed and miserable Potts kept his eyes on Kaviak, as if
hypnotised by the strange new death-look in the little face.
"Well, I can't carry you up," said the Boy; and after a second he began
to rub Potts furiously, glancing over now and then to see if Kaviak was
coming to, while Mac, dumb and tense, laboured on without success.
Potts, under the Boy's ministering, showed himself restored enough to
swear feebly.
"H'ray! my man's comin' round. How's yours?" No answer, but he could
see that the sweat poured off Mac's face as he worked unceasingly over
the child. The Boy pulled Potts into a sitting posture. It was then
that Mac, without looking up, said:
"Run and get whiskey. Run like hell!"
When he got back with the Colonel and the whiskey, O'Flynn floundering
in the distance, Potts was feebly striking his breast with his arms,
and Mac still bent above the motionless little body.
They tried to get some of the spirit down the child's throat, but the
tight-clenched teeth seemed to let little or nothing pass. The stuff
ran down towards his ears and into his neck. But Mac persisted, and
went on pouring, drop by drop, whenever he stopped trying to restore
the action of the lungs. O'Flynn just barely managed to get "a swig"
for Potts in the interval, though they all began to feel that Mac was
working to bring back something that had gone for ever. The Boy went
and bent his face down close over the rigid mouth to feel for the
breath. When he got up he turned away sharply, and stood looking
through tears into the fish-hole, saying to himself, "Yukon Inua has
taken him."
"He was in too long." Potts' teeth were chattering, and he looked
unspeakably wretched. "When my arm got numb I couldn't keep his head
up;" and he swallowed more whiskey. "You fellers oughtn't to have left
that damn trap up!"
"What's that got to do with it?" said the Boy guiltily.
"Kaviak knew it ought to be catchin' fish. When I came down he was
cryin' and pullin' the trap backwards towards the hole. Then he
slipped."
"Come, Mac," said the Colonel quietly, "let's carry the little man to
the cabin."
"No, no, not yet; stuffy heat isn't what he wants;" and he worked on.
They got Potts up on his feet.
"I called out to you fellers. Didn't you hear me?"
"Y-yes, but we didn't understand."
"Well, you'd better have come. It's too late now." O'Flynn half
dragged, half carried him up to the cabin, for he seemed unable to walk
in his frozen trousers. The Colonel and the Boy by a common impulse
went a little way in the opposite direction across the ice.
"What can we do, Colonel?"
"Nothing. It's not a bit o' use." They turned to go back.
"Well, the duckin' will be good for Potts' parki, anyhow," said the Boy
in an angry and unsteady voice.
"What do you mean?"
"When he asked me to hand it to him I nearly stuck fast to it. It's all
over syrup; and we don't wear furs at our meals."
"Tchah!" The Colonel stopped with a face of loathing.
"Yes, he was the only one of us that didn't bully the kid to-day."
"Couldn't go _that_ far, but couldn't own up."
"Potts is a cur."
"Yes, sah." Then, after an instant's reflection: "But he's a cur that
can risk his life to save a kid he don't care a damn for."
They went back to Mac, and found him pretty well worn out. The Colonel
took his place, but was soon pushed away. Mac understood better, he
said; had once brought a chap round that everybody said was ... dead.
He wasn't dead. The great thing was not to give in.
A few minutes after, Kaviak's eyelids fluttered, and came down over the
upturned eyeballs. Mac, with a cry that brought a lump to the Colonel's
throat, gathered the child up in his arms and ran with him up the hill
to the cabin.
* * * * *
Three hours later, when they were all sitting round the fire, Kaviak
dosed, and warm, and asleep in the lower bunk, the door opened, and in
walked a white man followed by an Indian.
"I'm George Benham." They had all heard of the Anvik trader, a man of
some wealth and influence, and they made him welcome.
The Indian was his guide, he said, and he had a team outside of seven
dogs. He was going to the steamship _Oklahoma_ on some business, and
promised Father Wills of Holy Cross that he'd stop on the way, and
deliver a letter to Mr. MacCann.
"Stop on the way! I should think so."
"We were goin' to have supper to-night, anyhow, and you'll stay and
sleep here."
All Mac's old suspicions of the Jesuits seemed to return with the
advent of that letter.
"I'll read it presently." He laid it on the mantel-shelf, between the
sewing-kit and the tobacco-can, and he looked at it, angrily, every now
and then, while he helped to skin Mr. Benham. That gentleman had thrown
back his hood, pulled off his great moose-skin gauntlets and his
beaver-lined cap, and now, with a little help, dragged the drill parki
over his head, and after that the fine lynx-bordered deer-skin,
standing revealed at last as a well-built fellow, of thirty-eight or
so, in a suit of mackinaws, standing six feet two in his heelless
salmon-skin snow-boots. "Bring in my traps, will you?" he said to the
Indian, and then relapsed into silence. The Indian reappeared with his
arms full.
"Fine lot o' pelts you have there," said the Colonel.
Benham didn't answer. He seemed to be a close-mouthed kind of a chap.
As the Indian sorted and piled the stuff in the corner, Potts said:
"Got any furs you want to sell?"
"No."
"Where you takin' 'em?"
"Down to the _Oklahoma_."
"All this stuff for Cap'n Rainey?"
Benham nodded.
"I reckon there's a mistake about the name, and he's Cap'n Tom Thumb or
Commodore Nutt." The Boy had picked up a little parki made carefully of
some very soft dark fur and trimmed with white rabbit, the small hood
bordered with white fox.
"That's a neat piece of work," said the Colonel.
Benham nodded. "One of the Shageluk squaws can do that sort of thing."
"What's the fur?"
"Musk-rat." And they talked of the weather--how the mercury last week
had been solid in the trading-post thermometer, so it was "over forty
degrees, anyhow."
"What's the market price of a coat like that?" Mac said suddenly.
"That isn't a 'market' coat. It's for a kid of Rainey's back in the
States."
Still Mac eyed it enviously.
"What part of the world are you from, sir?" said the Colonel when they
had drawn up to the supper table.
"San Francisco. Used to teach numskulls Latin and mathematics in the
Las Palmas High School."
"What's the value of a coat like that little one?" interrupted Mac.
"Oh, about twenty dollars."
"The Shageluks ask that much?"
Benham laughed. "If _you_ asked the Shageluks, they'd say forty."
"You've been some time in this part of the world, I understand," said
the Colonel.
"Twelve years."
"Without going home?"
"Been home twice. Only stayed a month. Couldn't stand it."
"I'll give you twenty-two dollars for that coat," said Mac.
"I've only got that one, and as I think I said--"
"I'll give you twenty-four."
"It's an order, you see. Rainey--"
"I'll give you twenty-six."
Benham shook his head.
"Sorry. Yes, it's queer about the hold this country gets on you. The
first year is hell, the second is purgatory, with glimpses ... of
something else. The third--well, more and more, forever after, you
realise the North's taken away any taste you ever had for civilisation.
That's when you've got the hang of things up here, when you've learned
not to stay in your cabin all the time, and how to take care of
yourself on the trail. But as for going back to the boredom of
cities--no, thank you."
Mac couldn't keep his eyes off the little coat. Finally, to enable him
to forget it, as it seemed, he got up and opened Father Wills' letter,
devoured its contents in silence, and flung it down on the table. The
Colonel took it up, and read aloud the Father's thanks for all the
white camp's kindness to Kaviak, and now that the sickness was about
gone from Holy Cross, how the Fathers felt that they must relieve their
neighbours of further trouble with the little native.
"I've said I'd take him back with me when I come up river about
Christmas."
"We'd be kind o' lost, now, without the little beggar," said the Boy,
glancing sideways at Mac.
"There's nothin' to be got by luggin' him off to Holy Cross," answered
that gentleman severely.
"Unless it's clo'es," said Potts.
"He's all right in the clo'es he's got," said Mac, with the air of one
who closes an argument. He stood up, worn and tired, and looked at his
watch.
"You ain't goin' to bed this early?" said Potts, quite lively and
recovered from his cold bath. That was the worst of sleeping in the
Little Cabin. Bedtime broke the circle; you left interesting visitors
behind, and sometimes the talk was better as the night wore on.
"Well, someone ought to wood up down yonder. O'Flynn, will you go?"
O'Flynn was in the act of declining the honour. But Benham, who had
been saying, "It takes a year in the Yukon for a man to get on to
himself," interrupted his favourite theme to ask: "Your other cabin
like this?"
Whereon, O'Flynn, shameless of the contrast in cabins, jumped up, and
said: "Come and see, while I wood up."
"You're very well fixed here," said Benham, rising and looking round
with condescension; "but men like you oughtn't to try to live without
real bread. No one can live and work on baking-powder."
There was a general movement to the door, of which Benham was the
centre.
"I tell you a lump of sour dough, kept over to raise the next batch, is
worth more in this country than a pocket full of gold."
"I'll give you twenty-eight for that musk-rat coat," said Mac.
Benham turned, stared back at him a moment, and then laughed.
"Oh, well, I suppose I can get another made for Rainey before the first
boat goes down."
"Then is it on account o' the bread," the Colonel was saying, "that the
old-timer calls himself a Sour-dough?"
"All on account o' the bread."
They crowded out after Benham.
"Coming?" The Boy, who was last, held the door open. Mac shook his
head.
It wasn't one of the bitter nights; they'd get down yonder, and talk by
the fire, till he went in and disturbed them. That was all he had
wanted. For Mac was the only one who had noticed that Kaviak had waked
up. He was lying as still as a mouse.
Alone with him at last, Mac kept his eyes religiously turned away, sat
down by the fire, and watched the sparks. By-and-by a head was put up
over the board of the lower bunk. Mac saw it, but sat quite still.
"Farva."
He meant to answer the appeal, half cleared his throat, but his voice
felt rusty; it wouldn't turn out a word.
Kaviak climbed timidly, shakily out, and stood in the middle of the
floor in his bare feet.
"Farva!"
He came a little nearer till the small feet sank into the rough brown
curls of the buffalo. The child stooped to pick up his wooden cricket,
wavered, and was about to fall. Mac shot out a hand, steadied him an
instant without looking, and then set the cricket in front of the fire.
He thereupon averted his face, and sat as before with folded arms. He
hadn't deliberately meant to make Kaviak be the first to "show his
hand" after all that had happened, but something had taken hold of him
and made him behave as he hadn't dreamed of behaving. It was, perhaps,
a fear of playing the fool as much as a determination to see how much
ground he'd lost with the youngster.
The child was observing him with an almost feverish intensity. With
eyes fixed upon the wooden face to find out how far he might venture,
shakily he dragged the cricket from where Mac placed it, closer,
closer, and as no terrible change in the unmoved face warned him to
desist, he pulled it into its usual evening position between Mac's
right foot and the fireplace. He sank down with a sigh of relief, as
one who finishes a journey long and perilous. The fire crackled and the
sparks flew gaily. Kaviak sat there in the red glow, dressed only in a
shirt, staring with incredulous, mournful eyes at the Farva who had--
Then, as Mac made no sign, he sighed again, and held out two little
shaky hands to the blaze.
Mac gave out a sound between a cough and a snort, and wiped his eyes on
the back of his hand.
Kaviak had started nervously.
"You cold?" asked Mac.
Kaviak nodded.
"Hungry?"
He nodded again, and fell to coughing.
Mac got up and brought the newly purchased coat to the fire.
"It's for you," he said, as the child's big eyes grew bigger with
admiration.
"Me? Me own coat?" He stood up, and his bare feet fluttered up and down
feebly, but with huge delight.
As the parki was held ready the child tumbled dizzily into it, and Mac
held him fast an instant.
In less than five minutes Kaviak was once more seated on the cricket,
but very magnificent now in his musk-rat coat, so close up to Mac that
he could lean against his arm, and eating out of a plenty-bowl on his
knees a discreet spoonful of mush drowned in golden syrup--a supper for
a Sultan if only there had been more!
When he had finished, he set the bowl down, and, as a puppy might, he
pushed at Mac's arm till he found a way in, laid his head down on
"Farva's" knee with a contented sigh, and closed his heavy eyes.
Mac put his hand on the cropped head and began:
"About that empty syrup-can--"
Kaviak started up, shaking from head to foot. Was the obscure nightmare
coming down to crush him again?
Mac tried to soothe him. But Kaviak, casting about for charms to disarm
the awful fury of the white man--able to endure with dignity any
reverse save that of having his syrup spilt--cried out:
"I solly--solly. Our Farva--"
"I'm sorry, too, Kaviak," Mac interrupted, gathering the child up to
him; "and we won't either of us do it any more."