SMOKE
When Rainey came on deck the next morning he found the schooner floating
in a small lagoon that made the center of a floe. The water in it was
slush, half solid. Main and fore were close furled, the headsails also,
and the _Karluk_ was nosing against the far end of the rapidly
diminishing basin. The wind was still lively.
All about were other floes, but they were widely separated, and between
them crisp waves of indigo were curling snappily.
The island stood up sharp and jagged, much larger than Rainey had
anticipated. It boasted two cones, from one of which smoke was lazily
trailing. Ice was piled in wild confusion about its shores, wrecked by
the gale that had blown hard from four till eight, and was now
subsiding with the swift change common to the Arctic.
A deep hum of bursting surf undertoned all other noises and, prisoned as
she was, the schooner and her floe were sweeping slowly toward the land
in the grip of a current rather than before the gusty wind.
Lund had fendered the schooner's bows effectively before he went below
with old sails that enveloped stem and swell, stuffed with ropes and
bits of canvas.
Within an hour the wind had ceased and the slush in the lagoon had
pancaked into flakes of forming ice that bid fair to become solid within
a short time, for the day was bitterly cold and tremendously bright. The
sky rose from filmy silver-azure to richest sapphire, and the rolling
waters between the floes were darkest purple-blue. As the whip of the
wind ceased they settled to a vast swell on which the great clumps of
ice rose and fell with dazzling reflections.
Lund came up within the hour and stood blinking at the brilliance.
"My eyes ain't as strong yit as they should be," he said to Rainey. "I
shouldn't have slung them glasses so hasty at Carlsen, though they
sp'iled his aim, at that. If this weather keeps up I'll have to make
snow-specs; there ain't another pair of smokes aboard." He made a shade
of his curved hand as he gazed at the island.
"Current's got us," he said, "an' we'll fetch up mighty close to the
beach. It lies between those two ridges, close together, buttin' out
from the volcano. Long Strait current splits on Wrangell Island, and
we're in the trend of the northern loop. That's why the sea don't freeze
up more solid. It's freezin' fast enough round us, where there ain't
motion."
He seemed well satisfied with the prospect. "Had breakfast?" he asked
Rainey, and then: "All right. We'll git the men aft."
He bellowed an order, and soon every one came trooping, to gather in two
groups either side of the cabin skylight. Their faces were eager with
the proximity of the gold, yet half sullen as they waited to hear what
Lund had to say. Since the attempt against him Lund had said nothing
about their shares. They acknowledged him as master, but they still
rebelled in spirit.
"There's the island," said Lund. "We'll make it afore sundown. The beach
is there, waitin' for us to dig it up. It'll be some job. I don't reckon
it's frozen hard, on'y crusted. If it is we'll bust the crust with
dynamite. But we got to hop to it. There'll be another cold spell after
this one peters out an' the next is like to be permanent. I want the
gold washed out afore then, an' us well down the Strait. It's up to you
to hump yoreselves, an' I'll help the humpin'.
"We'll cradle most of the stuff an', if they's time, we'll flume the
silt tailin's for the fine dust. Providin' we can git a fall of water.
There'll be plenty for all hands to do. An' the shares go as first
fixed. I ain't expectin' you to do the diggin' an' not git a pinch or
two of the dust."
The men's faces lighted, and they shuffled about, looking at one another
with grins of relief.
"No cheers?" asked Lund ironically. "Wall, I hardly expected enny.
Hansen, you'll be one of the foremen, with pay accordin'. Deming."
"I can't dig," said the hunter truculently. "Neither can Beale, with his
ribs."
"You've got a sweet nerve," said Lund. "I reckon you've won enough to be
sure of yore shares, if the boys pay up. Enough for you to do some
diggin' in yore pockets for Beale. His ribs 'ud be whole if you hadn't
started the bolshevik stunt. But I'll find something for both of you to
do. Don't let that worry you none.
"We've got mercury aboard somewhere," Lund continued, to Rainey, when
the men had dispersed, far more cheerful than they had gathered. "We'll
use that for concentration in the film riffles. Hansen'll have rockers
made that'll catch the big stuff. If the worst comes to the worst,
we'll load up the old hooker with the pay dirt an' wash it out on the
way home. I'll strip that beach down to bedrock if I have to work the
toes an' fingers off 'em."
By noon the schooner was glazed in as firmly as a toy model that is
mounted in a glass sea. The wind blew itself entirely out, but the
current bore them steadily on to the clamorous shore, where the swells
were creating promontories, bays, cliffs and chasms in the piled-up
confusion of the floes pounding on the rocks, breaking up or sliding
atop one another in noisy confusion.
The marble-whiteness of the ice masses was set off by the blues and soft
violets of their shadows, and by a pearly sheen wherever the planes
caught the light at a proper slant for the play of prisms. Beautiful as
it was, the sight was fearful to Rainey, in common with the crew. Only
Lund surveyed it nonchalantly.
"It's bustin' up fast," he said. "All we need is a little luck. If we
ain't got that there's no use of worryin'. We can't blast ourselves out
o' this without riskin' the schooner. We ought to be thankful we froze
in gentle. There ain't a plank started. The floe'll fend us off. There
ain't enny big chunks enny way near us aft. Luck--to make a decent
landin'--is all we need, an' it's my hunch it's comin' our way."
His "hunch" was correct. Though they did not actually make the little
bay on which the treasure beach debouched, they fetched up near it
against a broken hill of ice that had lodged on the sharp slopes of a
little promontory, making the connection without further damage than a
splitting of the forward end of their encasing floe, with hardly a jar
to the _Karluk_.
Lund sent men ashore over the ice, climbing to the promontory crags with
hawsers by which they tied up schooner, floe and all, to the land. If
the broken hill suffered further catastrophe, which did not seem likely,
its fragments would fall upon the floe. In case of emergency Lund
ordered men told off day and night to stand by the hawsers, to cast
loose or cut, as the extremity needed.
The main danger threatened from following floes piling up on theirs and
ramming over it to smash the schooner, but that was a risk that must be
met as it evolved, and there did not seem much prospect of the
happening.
It was dark before they were snugged. The men volunteered, through
Hansen, to commence digging that night by the light of big fires, so
crazy were they at the nearness of the gold. But Lund forbade it.
"You'll work reg'lar shifts when you git started," he said. "An' you
won't start till ter-morrer. We've got to stand by the ship ter-night
until we find out by mornin' how snug we're goin' to be berthed."
All night long they lay in a pandemonium of noise. After a while they
would become used to it as do the workers in a stampmill, but that night
it deafened them, kept them awake and alert, fearful, with the
tremendous cannonading. The bite of the frost made the timbers of the
_Karluk_ creak and its thrust continually worked among the stranded
masses with groaning thunders and shrill grindings, while the surf ever
boomed on the resonant sheets of ice.
The place held a strange mystery. On top of the main cone the volcanic
glow hung above the crater chimney, reflected waveringly on the rolling
clouds of smoke that blotted out the stars. There were no tremors, no
rumblings from the hidden furnace, only the flare of its stoking. The
stars that were visible were intensely brilliant points, and, when the
moon rose, it was accompanied by four mock moons bound in a halo that
widely encircled the true orb. The moon-dogs shone intermittently with
prismatic colors, like disks of mother-of-pearl, and the moon itself was
four-rayed.
Under moon and stars the coast snaked away to end in a deceptive glimmer
that persisted beyond the eye-range of definite dimensions. And, despite
all the sound, muffled and sharp, of splinterings and explosions, of
the reverberation of the swell, outside all this clamor, silence seemed
to gather and to wait. Silence and loneliness. It awed the crew, it
invested the spirits of Peggy Simms and Rainey, gazing at the mystic
beauty of the Arctic landscape.
The walls of forced-up ice shifted about them and came clattering down,
booming on their floe as if it had been a drum, and threatening to tilt
it by sheer weight had they not been fairly grounded forward. Other
floes came from seaward to batter at the cliffs, but the eddy that had
brought them to their resting-place seemed to have been dissolved in the
main current and, save for an occasional alarm, their stern was not
seriously invaded.
Only, as the night wore on, the floating masses became cemented to one
another and the shore. The _Karluk_ was hard and fast within two hundred
yards of her Tom Tiddler's ground, just over the promontory. If a thaw
came, all should go well. If Lund had been deceived, and the true
winter was setting in early, the prospects were far from cheerful,
though no one seemed to think of that possibility.
Beneath the glamour of the magic night, the weird paraselene of the
moon's phenomenon, the glow of the volcano, the noises, the men
whispered of one thing only--Gold!
Dawn came before they were aware of it, a sudden rush of light that dyed
the ice in every hue of red and orange, that tipped the frozen coast
with bursts of ruby flame that flared like beacons and gilded the crests
of the long swells, tinging all their world with a wild, unnatural
glory.
Lund, striding the deck, his red beard iced with his breath, suddenly
stopped and stared into the east. There, in the very eye of the dawn,
was a trail of smoke, like a plume against the flaming, three-quarters
circle of the rising sun!