The front room of the roadhouse was deserted save for the slumbering
bartender, back-tilted in a corner, his chin upon his chest, and one
other man who sat in the glare of a swing lamp playing solitaire. It
was, perhaps, three hours after midnight. The last carouser had turned
in. There was no sound save the scream of the black night and the cry of
the salt wind. At intervals only, when the storm lulled, there came from
the back room the sound of many men asleep.
I stumbled out from the rear room, heavy-eyed, half clad, and of a
vicious temper, dressing in sour silence beside the stove.
"Did they wake you up?" the card-player inquired.
"Yes."
"Me, too. I'd rather bunk in with a herd of walrus in the mating
season."
He was a long, slim man, with blue-black hair and a gas-bleached face of
startling pallor from which glittered two wild and roving eyes that
flitted in and out of my visual line toward, to, and past me with a
baffling elusive glimmer like that of jet spangles. His hands were
slender and bony and colorless, but while he talked they worked, each
independently. They performed queer, wizard antics with the
cards--one-handed cuts, rapid, fluttering shuffles and "frame-ups,"
after each pass leaving the pile of pasteboards as square-edged and even
as before. While he observed me over his shoulder one hand wandered to
some scattered poker-chips which clicked together beneath his touch into
a solid-ivory column as if separately magnetized. He shuffled and dealt
and cut the disks and made them do odd capers like the cards.
"I slept in a menagerie tent once," said he, "but these people have got
it on the animals." He nodded toward the sleeping-quarters.
"The open life seems to make a Pan's pipe out of the human nose," said
I, with disgust.
My indignation was intense and underlaid with a sullen fury at losing my
rest. I seized the stranger and led him with me to the open door,
saying, roughly, "Listen to that."
The room was large and low, dim-lighted and walled with tiers of
canvas-bottomed "standees" three high. The floor was a litter of boots,
the benches piled with garments. Every bed was full, and the place
groaned with sounds of strangulation, asphyxiation, and other
disagreeable demises. The bunks were peopled by tortured bodies, which
seemed to cry of throttlings, garrotings, and sundry hideous
punishments. My nervous system, unable to stand it, had risen a-quiver,
then shrieked for mercy.
From the nearest sleeper came the most unhappy sounds. He snored at
free-and-easy intervals with the voice of a whistling-buoy in a ground
swell--a handsome, resonant intake that died away reluctantly, then
changed to a loathsome gurgle, as if he blew his breath through a tube
into a pot of thick liquid. Now and then he smacked his lips and ground
his teeth until the gooseflesh arose on my neck.
"That's the fellow that drove me out," said my new acquaintance as we
went back to our seats beside the stove. "I had the berth below him. I
sleep light, anyhow, since I woke up one night down on the Texas
Panhandle and found a Chinaman astraddle of my brisket with a
butcherknife."
"That must have been nice," said I at random. "What did you do?"
"I doubled up my legs and kicked him into the camp-fire." The stranger
was dealing the cards again, this time into a fanlike, intricate
solitaire much affected by gamblers. "I tried the trick again to-night,
but I went wrong. I wanted to stop the swan-song of the guy over my
head, so I lifted up my feet and put them where the canvas sagged
lowest. Then I stretched my legs like a Jap juggler, but I fetched away
my own bunk and came down on the man below. I broke a snore short off in
him. He'll never get it out unless he has it pulled. That was us you
heard two hours ago."
I was too tired and sleepy to talk, for I had come down from the hills
the previous afternoon to find the equinoxial raging, and as a result
the roadhouse full from floor to ridge-pole with the motley crew that
had sifted out from the interior. The coastwise craft were hugging the
lee of the sandy islet, waiting for the blow to abate; telephone-wires
were down, and Bering's waters had piled in from the south until they
flooded the endless sloughs and tide flats behind Solomon City,
destroyed the ferries, and cut us off both east and west, by land and by
sea. It were better, I had thought, to wait on the coast for a day or
so, watching for a chance to dodge to Nome, than to return to the mines,
so I had lugged my war bag into Anderson's place and made formal demand
for shelter.
The proprietor had apologized as he assigned me a bunk. "It's the best
I've got," said he. "I've put you alongside of the stove, so if the boys
snore too loud you can heave coal on 'em. Them big lumps is better than
your boots."
I had tried both fuel and footgear fruitlessly, and when my outraged
ears would not permit further slumber I had given up the attempt. Now,
while the blue-haired man with insomnia dealt "Idiot's Delight" I sat
vaguely fascinated by the play of his hands, half dozing under the drone
of his voice.
The wind rioted without, whipping the sea spray across the sand-dunes
until it rattled upon our walls like shot. Meanwhile my companion
adventured aimlessly, his strange and vagrant fancies calling for no
answer, his odd and morbid journeyings matching well with the whimpering
night. His stories were without beginning, and they lacked any end. They
commenced without reason, led through unfrequented paths, then closed
for no cause. Through them ran no thread of relevancy. They were neither
cogent nor cohesive. Their incidents took shape and tumbled forth
irrelated and inconsequent. Wherefore I knew them for the truth, and
found myself ere long wide-eyed and still, my brain as keen as ever
nature made it.
The story of the dead Frenchman has seemed strained and gruesome to me
since, but that night the storm made it real, and the stranger's
unsmiling earnestness robbed it of offense. His words told me a tale of
which he had no thought, and painted pictures quite apart from those he
had in mind. His very frame of mind, his pagan superstition, his frank,
irreverent philosophy, disclosed queer glimpses of this land where
morals are of the fourth dimension, where life is a gamble and death a
joke. Whether he really believed all he said or whether he made sport of
me I do not know. It may be that the elfin voices of the storm roused in
him an impulse to gratify his distorted sense of humor at my expense--or
at his own. He began somewhat as follows:
"It's a good night for a dead man to walk." Then, seeing the flicker in
my eyes, he ran on: "You don't think they can do it, eh? Well, I didn't
believe it neither, and I'm not sure I believe it now, but I've seen
queer things--queer things--and I've only got one pair to draw to.
Either they happened as I saw them or I'm crazy." He leaped at his story
boldly.
"I'm pretty tired and hungry when I hit Council City late one fall, for
I'd upset my rowboat, lost my outfit, and 'mushed' it one hundred fifty
miles. My whole digestive paraphernalia is in a state of _innocuous
desuetude_, if you know what that is, because all I save from the wreck
is a flour-sack full of cigarette-papers and a package of chocolate
pills about the size of a match-head. Each one of these pellets is
warranted to contain sufficient nourishment to last the Germany army for
one month. I read it on the label. They may have had it in them; I don't
know. I swallowed one every morning and then filled up on reindeer moss
till I felt like the leaping-pad in a circus.
"Now, when I reach camp I find there ain't any fresh grub to speak of.
But I can't get away, so I stick on until spring. See! In time we begin
to have scurvy something terrible. One man out of every five cashes in.
I'm living in a cabin with a lot of Frenchmen and we bury seven from
this one shack--seven, that's all! It gets on my nerves finally. I don't
like dead men. Now, the last two who fall sick is old man Manard and my
pal, young Pete De Foe. Pete has a ten-dollar gold piece and Manard owns
a dog. Inasmuch as they both knew that they can't weather it out till
the break-up, Pete bets his ten dollars against the dog that he'll die
before Manard. Well, this is something new in the sporting line, and we
begin to string our bets pretty free. There ain't much excitement going
on, so the boys visit the cabin every day, look over the entries, then
go outside and make book. I open up a Paris mutuel. The old man is a
seven-to-one favorite at the start because he had all the best of it on
form, but the youngster puts up a grand race. For three weeks they
seesaw back and forth. First one looks like a winner, then the other.
It's as pretty running as I ever see. Then Pete lets out a wonderful
burst of speed, 'zings' over the last quarter, noses out Manard at the
wire, and brings home the money. He dies at 3 A.M. and wins by four
hours. I cop eighty-four dollars, six pairs of suspenders, a keg of wire
nails, and a frying-pan, which constitutes all the circulating medium of
the camp. I'm the stakeholder for the late deceased also, so I find
myself the administrator of Manard's dog and the ten dollars that Pete
put up.
"Now, seeing that it had been a killing finish, we arrange for a
double-barreled burial and a swell funeral. The ground is froze, of
course, but we dig two holes through the gravel till we break a
pick-point and decide to let it go at that. The 'Bare-headed' Kid is
clergyman because he has a square-cut coat that buttons up the front to
his chin. There ain't any Bible in camp, so he read some recipes out of
a baking-powder cook-book, after which Deaf Mike tries to play 'Taps' on
the cornet. But he's held the horn in his mit during the services, and,
the temperature being forty degrees below freezo, when he wets his lips
to play they stick to the mouthpiece and crab the hymn. As a whole, it
is an enjoyable affair, however, and the best-conducted funeral of the
winter. Everybody has a good time, though nothing rough.
"Now, I've been friendly to young Pete De Foe--him and I bunked
together--and the next night he comes to me, saying that he can't rest.
I see him as plain as I see you.
"'What's wrong?' says I. 'Are you cold?'
"'No. The ground is chilly, but it ain't that. Manard, the old hellion,
won't let me sleep. He's doing a sand jig on my grave. He says I won
that bet crooked and died ahead of time just to get his dog. He's sore
on you, too.'
"'What's he sore on me for?' says I.
"'He says he's an old man, and he'd 'a' died first if you hadn't put in
with me to double-cross him. He's laying for you,' says Pete.
"Well, I'm pretty sick myself, with a four months' diet of pea soup and
oatmeal, and when I wake up I think it's a dream. But the next night
Pete is back again, complaining worse than ever. It seems the ghost of
old man Manard is still buck-and-winging on Pete's coffin, and he begs
me to come down and call the old reprobate off so that he can get some
rest. He comes back the third night, the fourth, and the fifth, and by
and by Manard himself comes up to the cabin and begins to abuse me. He
says he wants his dog back, but naturally I can't give it to him. It
gets so that I can't sleep at all. Finally, when Pete ain't sitting on
my bunk Manard is calling me names and gritting his teeth at me. I begin
to fall off in weight like a jockey in a sweat bath. It gets so I have
to sit up all night in a chair and make the fellers prod me in the
stomach with a stick whenever I doze off. I tell you, stranger, it was
worse than horrible. I don't know how I made it through till spring.
"Well, in the early summer I get a letter from the steamboat agent at
Nome saying Manard's people out in the States have slipped him some
coin, with instructions to send the old man out so they can give him
decent burial. He offers me one-fifty to bring him down to the coast.
Now, this decent-burial talk makes me sore, for I staged the obsequies
myself, and they were in perfect form. It was one of the tastiest
funerals I ever mixed with. However, I'm broke, so I agree to deliver
what is left of Manard at the mouth of the river, and the agent says
he'll have a first-class coffin shipped down to the trader at Chinik,
our landing. When I deliver Manard, ready for shipment, I get my hundred
and fifty.
"I give you my word I ain't tickled pink with this undertaking. I'm not
strong on body-snatching, and I have a hunch that the shade of old
Manard is still hanging around somewhere. However, a bird in the hand is
the noblest work of God, and I need that roll, so I make ready. It takes
me half a day to get drunk enough to want to do the job, and when I get
drunk enough to want to do it I'm so drunk I can't. Then I have to sober
up and begin all over again. The minute I get sober enough to do the
trick I realize I ain't drunk enough to stand the strain. I jockey that
way for quite a spell till I finally strike an average, being
considerable scared and reckless to the same extent.
"I remembered that we planted the old man in the left-hand grave, but
when I get to the graveyard I can't recollect whether I stood at the
foot or at the head of the hole during the services--a pint of that
mining-camp hootch would box the compass for any man--so I think I'll
make sure.
"I have brought along three tools--a pick, a shovel, and a bottle of
rye. The ground is froze, so I use all of them. Naturally I can't afford
to get the wrong Frenchman, so I pry up the lid of the first box I
uncover and take a good rubber. Well, sir, it is a shock! Instead of
rags and bones like I'm expecting, there is old Manard in statuary quo,
so to speak. Froze? Maybe so. Anyhow, he grins at me! That's what I
said! He grins at me, and I take it on the lam. Understand, I have no
intentions of running away--in fact, I don't know I'm doing it until I
fetch up back in the saloon. It seems I just balanced my body on my legs
and they did all the work.
"Well, I'm pretty well rattled, so I blot up another pint of
pain-killer, and finally the bartender goes back with me and helps load
Manard into my Peterboro. I'm pretty wet by this time. We get the box
into the canoe all right, but it's too big to fit under the seat, so we
place the foot of it on the bottom of the boat and rest the other end on
a paddle laid across the gunnels. This sort of gives Manard the
appearance of lounging back on an incline. You see, when I ripped up the
boards to take a look I broke off a piece at a knot-hole, and that
allows him a chance to look out with one eye. He seems to approve of the
position, however, so I get in at the stern, facing him, and ask if he's
ready. He gives me the nod, and I shove off. Just for company I take my
grave-digging tools along--that is, all but the pick and the shovel. It
was pretty near full when I started, but I lose the cork and drink it up
for safety.
"I don't remember much about the first part of the trip except that I
get awful lonesome. By and by I begin to sing:
"'Oh, the French are in the bay!' said the Shaun Van Vocht.
'The French are in the bay,' said the Shaun Van Vocht.
'The French are in the bay. They'll be here without delay.
'But their colors will decay,' said the Shaun Van Vocht."
"I've got a mean singing-voice when I'm sober, but when I'm kippered
it's positively insulting. It makes my passenger sore, and he shows it.
Now, I'm not saying that Manard wasn't as dead as a dried herring. He
was past and gone, and he'd made his exit all right. He'd moved out, and
his lease had expired. But I saw that box move. It shifted from side to
side. I quit singing. My song-fountain ran dry. Says I to myself: 'I
just neglected to lash you down, Mr. Manard; you didn't really turn
over. It was the motion of the boat.' Then, just to make sure, I break
forth into 'Johnny Crapaud,' keeping my eye on the right lens of the old
man where it showed through the broken board. This time there ain't a
doubt of it. He lurches, box and all, clean out of plumb and nearly
capsizes me. His one lamp blazes. Yes, sir, blazes! I tries to get out
of range of it, but it follers me like a searchlight. I creeps forward
to cover it up with my coat, but the old frog-eater leans to starboard
so far that I have to balance on the port gunnel to keep from going
over. We begin to spin in the current. Manard sees he has me buffaloed,
and it pleases him. He wags his head at me and grins like he did when he
came to me in my sleep.
"Well, sir, that eye enthralls me. It destroys my chain of thought. I
feel the chills stealing into my marrow, and that one hundred and fifty
dollars looks mighty small and insignificant. By and by I begin to
figure it out this way: says I, 'I've outrun him once to-day, and if I
can get ashore I'll try it again.' But when I turn the canoe toward
shore Manard heels over till we take water.
"'Lie still, you blame fool!' says I. 'If you feel that way about it
I'll stay with the ship, of course.' I can see the corner of his mouth
curl up at that, and he slides back into position. Then I know that
he'll let me stick as long as I don't try to pull out and leave him
flat. You really can't blame a corpse much under the circumstances.
However, I can't swim, so I try to square myself. I make conversation of
a polite and friendly nature, and the old boy settles back to enjoy
himself.
"Well, this one-sided talkfest gets tiresome after a while. I run out of
topics, so I tell him funny stories. Sometimes he likes them, and
sometimes he 'most jumps out of the box. Sore? Say, when I pull a wheeze
that he don't like he makes it known quick, and I sit clutching the
gunnels, with my hair on end while he rocks the boat like a demon.
"When I get to the mouth of the river it's night. I find a stiff breeze
blowing and the bay covered with whitecaps, so I try to convince Manard
that we'd better camp. But I no more than suggest it till I have to bail
for dear life. Seeing that he's dead set to keep going, I kiss myself
good-by and paddle out across the bay. How we ever made it I don't know,
but along about midnight we blow into Chinik, with me singing songs to
my passenger and cracking 'Joe Millers' that came over in seventy-six.
I'm still pretty drunk.
"The trader tells me that the coffin hasn't come from Nome yet. But the
steamer is due before morning, so I ask him to cache Manard somewhere
and wake me up when the boat comes. Then I go to the hay. I'm tuckered
out. It seems that the coaster comes in a few hours later, but the
trader is dealing a stud game and tells the purser to dump his freight
on the beach. They do as ordered, then pull out. About daylight the wind
shifts, the tide rises and begins to wash the merchandise away. Two
'rough-necks' get busy saving their outfit, when what comes bobbing past
on the waves but a handsome zink-lined casket--the one from Nome.
"'Hey, Bill, cop that box; it'll make a swell bath-tub,' says one. So
the other pulls up his rubber boots, wades out, and brings it in. The
trader, hearing that his goods are in danger, adjourns the game long
enough to see about it. He hurries down to the beach, looks over his
stuff, then inquires:
"'Where's my coffin?'
"'You 'ain't got no more coffin than a rabbit,' says one of the miners.
"'Oh, yes, I have. That's it right there.'
"'I guess not. That's my coffin. I copped it on the high seas--flotsam
and jetsam,' says the 'roughneck.' 'What's more, I'm going to use it for
a cupboard or a cozy corner. If you want it bad pay me fifty dollars
salvage and it's yours.' Naturally the trader belched.
"'All right. If you don't want it I'll use it myself,' says the miner.
'It's the first one I ever had, and I like it fine. There's no telling
when I'll get another.'
"'Said time ain't but a minute,' observes the trader, 'unless you gimme
that freight.'
"There is some further dispute till the miner, being a quick-tempered
party, reaches for his Gat. After the smoke clears away it is found that
he has made an error of judgment, that the storekeeper is gifted as a
prophet, and that the 'roughneck' is ready for his coffin.
"Now, inasmuch as this had been a purely personal affair and the boys
was anxious to reopen the stud game, they exonerated the trader from all
blame complete, and he, being ever anxious to maintain a reputation for
fair dealing and just to show that there ain't no animus behind his
action, gives the coffin to the man who had claimed it. What's more, he
helps to lay him out with his own hands. Naturally this is considered
conduct handsome enough for any country. In an hour the man is buried
and the poker game is open again. The trader apologizes to the boys for
the delay, saying:
"'The box is mine, all right, and I'm sorry this play come up, but
the late lamented was so set on having that piece of bric-à-brac
that it seemed a shame not to give it to him.'"
At this point the narrator fell silent, much to my surprise, for
throughout this weird recital I had sat spellbound, forgetful of the
hour, the storm outside, and the snoring men in the bunkroom. When he
had gone thus far he began with a bewildering change of topic.
"Did you ever hear how Dawson Sam cut the ears off a bank dealer?"
"Hold on!" said I. "What's the rest of this story? What became of
Manard?"
"Oh, he's there yet, for all I know," said the stranger as he shuffled
the cards. "His folks wouldn't send no more money, the steamboat agent
at Nome had done his share, and the trader at Chinik said he wasn't
responsible."
"And you? Didn't you get your one hundred and fifty dollars?"
"No. You see, it was a C. O. D. shipment. I wake up along about noon,
put my head under the pump, and then look up the trader. He is still
playing stud.
"'Where's my casket?' says I. 'I've got my dead man, but I don't collect
on him till he's crated and f. o. b.' The trader has an ace in the hole
and two kings in sight, so he says over his shoulder:
"'I'm sorry, old man, but while you was asleep a tenderfoot jumped your
coffin.' Now, this Dawson Sam has a crooked bank dealer named--"
"I think I'll go back to bed," said I.