It was the gosh-dangdest stampede I ever seen. A thousand dog-teams
hittin' the ice. You couldn't see 'm fer smoke. Two white men an' a
Swede froze to death that night, an' there was a dozen busted their
lungs. But didn't I see with my own eyes the bottom of the
water-hole? It was yellow with gold like a mustard-plaster. That's
why I staked the Yukon for a minin' claim. That's what made the
stampede. An' then there was nothin' to it. That's what I
said--NOTHIN' to it. An' I ain't got over guessin' yet.--NARRATIVE OF
SHORTY.
John Messner clung with mittened hand to the bucking gee-pole and held
the sled in the trail. With the other mittened hand he rubbed his
cheeks and nose. He rubbed his cheeks and nose every little while. In
point of fact, he rarely ceased from rubbing them, and sometimes, as
their numbness increased, he rubbed fiercely. His forehead was covered
by the visor of his fur cap, the flaps of which went over his ears. The
rest of his face was protected by a thick beard, golden-brown under its
coating of frost.
Behind him churned a heavily loaded Yukon sled, and before him toiled
a string of five dogs. The rope by which they dragged the sled rubbed
against the side of Messner's leg. When the dogs swung on a bend in
the trail, he stepped over the rope. There were many bends, and he was
compelled to step over it often. Sometimes he tripped on the rope, or
stumbled, and at all times he was awkward, betraying a weariness so
great that the sled now and again ran upon his heels.
When he came to a straight piece of trail, where the sled could get
along for a moment without guidance, he let go the gee-pole and batted
his right hand sharply upon the hard wood. He found it difficult to
keep up the circulation in that hand. But while he pounded the one
hand, he never ceased from rubbing his nose and cheeks with the other.
"It's too cold to travel, anyway," he said. He spoke aloud, after the
manner of men who are much by themselves. "Only a fool would travel
at such a temperature. If it isn't eighty below, it's because it's
seventy-nine."
He pulled out his watch, and after some fumbling got it back into the
breast pocket of his thick woollen jacket. Then he surveyed the heavens
and ran his eye along the white sky-line to the south.
"Twelve o'clock," he mumbled, "A clear sky, and no sun."
He plodded on silently for ten minutes, and then, as though there had
been no lapse in his speech, he added:
"And no ground covered, and it's too cold to travel."
Suddenly he yelled "Whoa!" at the dogs, and stopped. He seemed in a
wild panic over his right hand, and proceeded to hammer it furiously
against the gee-pole.
"You--poor--devils!" he addressed the dogs, which had dropped down
heavily on the ice to rest. His was a broken, jerky utterance, caused
by the violence with which he hammered his numb hand upon the wood.
"What have you done anyway that a two-legged other animal should come
along, break you to harness, curb all your natural proclivities, and
make slave-beasts out of you?"
He rubbed his nose, not reflectively, but savagely, in order to drive
the blood into it, and urged the dogs to their work again. He travelled
on the frozen surface of a great river. Behind him it stretched away in
a mighty curve of many miles, losing itself in a fantastic jumble of
mountains, snow-covered and silent. Ahead of him the river split into
many channels to accommodate the freight of islands it carried on its
breast. These islands were silent and white. No animals nor humming
insects broke the silence. No birds flew in the chill air. There was no
sound of man, no mark of the handiwork of man. The world slept, and it
was like the sleep of death.
John Messner seemed succumbing to the apathy of it all. The frost was
benumbing his spirit. He plodded on with bowed head, unobservant,
mechanically rubbing nose and cheeks, and batting his steering hand
against the gee-pole in the straight trail-stretches.
But the dogs were observant, and suddenly they stopped, turning their
heads and looking back at their master out of eyes that were wistful
and questioning. Their eyelashes were frosted white, as were their
muzzles, and they had all the seeming of decrepit old age, what of the
frost-rime and exhaustion.
The man was about to urge them on, when he checked himself, roused
up with an effort, and looked around. The dogs had stopped beside a
water-hole, not a fissure, but a hole man-made, chopped laboriously
with an axe through three and a half feet of ice. A thick skin of new
ice showed that it had not been used for some time. Messner glanced
about him. The dogs were already pointing the way, each wistful and
hoary muzzle turned toward the dim snow-path that left the main river
trail and climbed the bank of the island.
"All right, you sore-footed brutes," he said. "I'll investigate. You're
not a bit more anxious to quit than I am."
He climbed the bank and disappeared. The dogs did not lie down, but
on their feet eagerly waited his return. He came back to them, took
a hauling-rope from the front of the sled, and put it around his
shoulders. Then he _gee'd_ the dogs to the right and put them at the
bank on the run. It was a stiff pull, but their weariness fell from
them as they crouched low to the snow, whining with eagerness and
gladness as they struggled upward to the last ounce of effort in their
bodies. When a dog slipped or faltered, the one behind nipped his hind
quarters. The man shouted encouragement and threats, and threw all his
weight on the hauling-rope.
They cleared the bank with a rush, swung to the left, and dashed up to
a small log cabin. It was a deserted cabin of a single room, eight feet
by ten on the inside. Messner unharnessed the animals, unloaded his
sled and took possession. The last chance wayfarer had left a supply of
firewood. Messner set up his light sheet-iron stove and started a fire.
He put five sun-cured salmon into the oven to thaw out for the dogs,
and from the water-hole filled his coffee-pot and cooking-pail.
While waiting for the water to boil, he held his face over the stove.
The moisture from his breath had collected on his beard and frozen into
a great mass of ice, and this he proceeded to thaw out. As it melted
and dropped upon the stove it sizzled and rose about him in steam. He
helped the process with his fingers, working loose small ice-chunks
that fell rattling to the floor.
A wild outcry from the dogs without did not take him from his task. He
heard the wolfish snarling and yelping of strange dogs and the sound of
voices. A knock came on the door.
"Come in," Messner called, in a voice muffled because at the moment he
was sucking loose a fragment of ice from its anchorage on his upper lip.
The door opened, and, gazing out of his cloud of steam, he saw a man
and a woman pausing on the threshold.
"Come in," he said peremptorily, "and shut the door!"
Peering through the steam, he could make out but little of their
personal appearance. The nose and cheek strap worn by the woman and the
trail-wrappings about her head allowed only a pair of black eyes to be
seen. The man was dark-eyed and smooth-shaven all except his mustache,
which was so iced up as to hide his mouth.
"We just wanted to know if there is any other cabin around here," he
said, at the same time glancing over the unfurnished state of the room.
"We thought this cabin was empty."
"It isn't my cabin," Messner answered. "I just found it a few minutes
ago. Come right in and camp. Plenty of room, and you won't need your
stove. There's room for all."
At the sound of his voice the woman peered at him with quick
curiousness.
"Get your things off," her companion said to her. "I'll unhitch and get
the water so we can start cooking."
Messner took the thawed salmon outside and fed his dogs. He had to
guard them against the second team of dogs, and when he had reëntered
the cabin the other man had unpacked the sled and fetched water.
Messner's pot was boiling. He threw in the coffee, settled it with half
a cup of cold water, and took the pot from the stove. He thawed some
sour-dough biscuits in the oven, at the same time heating a pot of
beans he had boiled the night before and that had ridden frozen on the
sled all morning.
Removing his utensils from the stove, so as to give the newcomers a
chance to cook, he proceeded to take his meal from the top of his
grub-box, himself sitting on his bed-roll. Between mouthfuls he talked
trail and dogs with the man, who, with head over the stove, was thawing
the ice from his mustache. There were two bunks in the cabin, and into
one of them, when he had cleared his lip, the stranger tossed his
bed-roll.
"We'll sleep here," he said, "unless you prefer this bunk. You're the
first comer and you have first choice, you know."
"That's all right," Messner answered. "One bunk's just as good as the
other."
He spread his own bedding in the second bunk, and sat down on the edge.
The stranger thrust a physician's small travelling case under his
blankets at one end to serve for a pillow.
"Doctor?" Messner asked.
"Yes," came the answer, "but I assure you I didn't come into the
Klondike to practise."
The woman busied herself with cooking, while the man sliced bacon and
fired the stove. The light in the cabin was dim, filtering through in
a small window made of onion-skin writing paper and oiled with bacon
grease, so that John Messner could not make out very well what the
woman looked like. Not that he tried. He seemed to have no interest in
her. But she glanced curiously from time to time into the dark corner
where he sat.
"Oh, it's a great life," the doctor proclaimed enthusiastically,
pausing from sharpening his knife on the stovepipe. "What I like
about it is the struggle, the endeavor with one's own hands, the
primitiveness of it, the realness."
"The temperature is real enough," Messner laughed.
"Do you know how cold it actually is?" the doctor demanded.
The other shook his head.
"Well, I'll tell you. Seventy-four below zero by spirit thermometer on
the sled."
"That's one hundred and six below freezing point--too cold for
travelling, eh?"
"Practically suicide," was the doctor's verdict. "One exerts himself.
He breathes heavily, taking into his lungs the frost itself. It chills
his lungs, freezes the edges of the tissues. He gets a dry, hacking
cough as the dead tissue sloughs away, and dies the following summer of
pneumonia, wondering what it's all about. I'll stay in this cabin for a
week, unless the thermometer rises at least to fifty below."
"I say, Tess," he said, the next moment, "don't you think that coffee's
boiled long enough!"
At the sound of the woman's name, John Messner became suddenly
alert. He looked at her quickly, while across his face shot a
haunting expression, the ghost of some buried misery achieving swift
resurrection. But the next moment, and by an effort of will, the ghost
was laid again. His face was as placid as before, though he was still
alert, dissatisfied with what the feeble light had shown him of the
woman's face.
Automatically, her first act had been to set the coffee-pot back.
It was not until she had done this that she glanced at Messner. But
already he had composed himself. She saw only a man sitting on the edge
of the bunk and incuriously studying the toes of his moccasins. But, as
she turned casually to go about her cooking, he shot another swift look
at her, and she, glancing as swiftly back, caught his look. He shifted
on past her to the doctor, though the slightest smile curled his lip in
appreciation of the way she had trapped him.
She drew a candle from the grub-box and lighted it. One look at her
illuminated face was enough for Messner. In the small cabin the widest
limit was only a matter of several steps, and the next moment she was
alongside of him. She deliberately held the candle close to his face
and stared at him out of eyes wide with fear and recognition. He smiled
quietly back at her.
"What are you looking for, Tess?" the doctor called.
"Hairpins," she replied, passing on and rummaging in a clothes-bag on
the bunk.
They served their meal on their grub-box, sitting on Messner's grub-box
and facing him. He had stretched out on his bunk to rest, lying on his
side, his head on his arm. In the close quarters it was as though the
three were together at table.
"What part of the States do you come from?" Messner asked.
"San Francisco," answered the doctor. "I've been in here two years,
though."
"I hail from California myself," was Messner's announcement.
The woman looked at him appealingly, but he smiled and went on:
"Berkeley, you know."
The other man was becoming interested.
"U. C.?" he asked.
"Yes, Class of '86."
"I meant faculty," the doctor explained. "You remind me of the type."
"Sorry to hear you say so," Messner smiled back. "I'd prefer being
taken for a prospector or a dog-musher."
"I don't think he looks any more like a professor than you do a
doctor," the woman broke in.
"Thank you," said Messner. Then, turning to her companion, "By the way,
Doctor, what is your name, if I may ask?"
"Haythorne, if you'll take my word for it. I gave up cards with
civilization."
"And Mrs. Haythorne," Messner smiled and bowed.
She flashed a look at him that was more anger than appeal.
Haythorne was about to ask the other's name. His mouth had opened to
form the question when Messner cut him off.
"Come to think of it, Doctor, you may possibly be able to satisfy my
curiosity. There was a sort of scandal in faculty circles some two or
three years ago. The wife of one of the English professors--er, if you
will pardon me, Mrs. Haythorne--disappeared with some San Francisco
doctor, I understood, though his name does not just now come to my
lips. Do you remember the incident?"
Haythorne nodded his head. "Made quite a stir at the time. His name
was Womble--Graham Womble. He had a magnificent practice. I knew him
somewhat."
"Well, what I was trying to get at was what had become of them. I was
wondering if you had heard. They left no trace, hide nor hair."
"He covered his tracks cunningly." Haythorne cleared his throat. "There
was rumor that they went to the South Seas--were lost on a trading
schooner in a typhoon, or something like that."
"I never heard that," Messner said. "You remember the case, Mrs.
Haythorne?"
"Perfectly," she answered, in a voice the control of which was in
amazing contrast to the anger that blazed in the face she turned aside
so that Haythorne might not see.
The latter was again on the verge of asking his name, when Messner
remarked:
"This Dr. Womble, I've heard he was very handsome, and--er--quite a
success, so to say, with the ladies."
"Well, if he was, he finished himself off by that affair," Haythorne
grumbled.
"And the woman was a termagant--at least so I've been told. It was
generally accepted in Berkeley that she made life--er--not exactly
paradise for her husband."
"I never heard that," Haythorne rejoined. "In San Francisco the talk
was all the other way."
"Woman sort of a martyr, eh?--crucified on the cross of matrimony?"
The doctor nodded. Messner's gray eyes were mildly curious as he went
on:
"That was to be expected--two sides to the shield. Living in Berkeley I
only got the one side. She was a great deal in San Francisco, it seems."
"Some coffee, please," Haythorne said.
The woman refilled his mug, at the same time breaking into light
laughter.
"You're gossiping like a pair of beldames," she chided them.
"It's so interesting," Messner smiled at her, then returned to
the doctor. "The husband seems then to have had a not very savory
reputation in San Francisco?"
"On the contrary, he was a moral prig," Haythorne blurted out, with
apparently undue warmth. "He was a little scholastic shrimp without a
drop of red blood in his body."
"Did you know him?"
"Never laid eyes on him. I never knocked about in university circles."
"One side of the shield again," Messner said, with an air of weighing
the matter judicially. "While he did not amount to much, it is
true--that is, physically--I'd hardly say he was as bad as all that.
He did take an active interest in student athletics. And he had some
talent. He once wrote a Nativity play that brought him quite a bit of
local appreciation. I have heard, also, that he was slated for the head
of the English department, only the affair happened and he resigned and
went away. It quite broke his career, or so it seemed. At any rate, on
our side the shield, it was considered a knock-out blow to him. It was
thought he cared a great deal for his wife."
Haythorne, finishing his mug of coffee, grunted uninterestedly and
lighted his pipe.
"It was fortunate they had no children," Messner continued.
But Haythorne, with a glance at the stove, pulled on his cap and
mittens.
"I'm going out to get some wood," he said. "Then I can take off my
moccasins and be comfortable."
The door slammed behind him. For a long minute there was silence. The
man continued in the same position on the bed. The woman sat on the
grub-box, facing him.
"What are you going to do?" she asked abruptly.
Messner looked at her with lazy indecision. "What do you think I ought
to do? Nothing scenic, I hope. You see I am stiff and trail-sore, and
this bunk is so restful."
She gnawed her lower lip and fumed dumbly.
"But--" she began vehemently, then clenched her hands and stopped.
"I hope you don't want me to kill Mr.--er--Haythorne," he said gently,
almost pleadingly. "It would be most distressing, and, I assure you,
really it is unnecessary."
"But you must do something," she cried.
"On the contrary, it is quite conceivable that I do not have to do
anything."
"You would stay here?"
He nodded.
She glanced desperately around the cabin and at the bed unrolled on the
other bunk. "Night is coming on. You can't stop here. You can't! I tell
you, you simply can't!"
"Of course I can. I might remind you that I found this cabin first and
that you are my guests."
Again her eyes travelled around the room, and the terror in them leaped
up at sight of the other bunk.
"Then we'll have to go," she announced decisively.
"Impossible. You have a dry, hacking cough--the sort Mr.--er--Haythorne
so aptly described. You've already slightly chilled your lungs.
Besides, he is a physician and knows. He would never permit it."
"Then what are you going to do?" she demanded again, with a tense,
quiet utterance that boded an outbreak.
Messner regarded her in a way that was almost paternal, what of the
profundity of pity and patience with which he contrived to suffuse it.
"My dear Theresa, as I told you before, I don't know. I really haven't
thought about it."
"Oh! You drive me mad!" She sprang to her feet, wringing her hands in
impotent wrath. "You never used to be this way."
"I used to be all softness and gentleness," he nodded concurrence. "Was
that why you left me?"
"You are so different, so dreadfully calm. You frighten me. I feel you
have something terrible planned all the while. But whatever you do,
don't do anything rash. Don't get excited--"
"I don't get excited any more," he interrupted. "Not since you went
away."
"You have improved--remarkably," she retorted.
He smiled acknowledgment. "While I am thinking about what I shall do,
I'll tell you what you will have to do--tell Mr.--er--Haythorne who I
am. It may make our stay in this cabin more--may I say, sociable?"
"Why have you followed me into this frightful country?" she asked
irrelevantly.
"Don't think I came here looking for you, Theresa. Your vanity shall
not be tickled by any such misapprehension. Our meeting is wholly
fortuitous. I broke with the life academic and I had to go somewhere.
To be honest, I came into the Klondike because I thought it the place
you were least liable to be in."
There was a fumbling at the latch, then the door swung in and Haythorne
entered with an armful of firewood. At the first warning, Theresa began
casually to clear away the dishes. Haythorne went out again after more
wood.
"Why didn't you introduce us?" Messner queried.
"I'll tell him," she replied, with a toss of her head. "Don't think I'm
afraid."
"I never knew you to be afraid, very much, of anything."
"And I'm not afraid of confession, either," she said, with softening
face and voice.
"In your case, I fear, confession is exploitation by indirection,
profit-making by ruse, self-aggrandizement at the expense of God."
"Don't be literary," she pouted, with growing tenderness. "I never did
like epigrammatic discussion. Besides, I'm not afraid to ask you to
forgive me."
"There is nothing to forgive, Theresa. I really should thank you. True,
at first I suffered; and then, with all the graciousness of spring,
it dawned upon me that I was happy, very happy. It was a most amazing
discovery."
"But what if I should return to you?" she asked.
"I should" (he looked at her whimsically), "be greatly perturbed."
"I am your wife. You know you have never got a divorce."
"I see," he meditated. "I have been careless. It will be one of the
first things I attend to."
She came over to his side, resting her hand on his arm. "You don't
want me, John?" Her voice was soft and caressing, her hand rested like
a lure. "If I told you I had made a mistake? If I told you that I was
very unhappy?--and I am. And I did make a mistake."
Fear began to grow on Messner. He felt himself wilting under the
lightly laid hand. The situation was slipping away from him, all his
beautiful calmness was going. She looked at him with melting eyes, and
he, too, seemed all dew and melting. He felt himself on the edge of an
abyss, powerless to withstand the force that was drawing him over.
"I am coming back to you, John. I am coming back to-day ... now."
As in a nightmare, he strove under the hand. While she talked, he
seemed to hear, rippling softly, the song of the Lorelei. It was as
though, somewhere, a piano were playing and the actual notes were
impinging on his ear-drums.
Suddenly he sprang to his feet, thrust her from him as her arms
attempted to clasp him, and retreated backward to the door. He was in a
panic.
"I'll do something desperate!" he cried.
"I warned you not to get excited." She laughed mockingly, and went
about washing the dishes. "Nobody wants you. I was just playing with
you. I am happier where I am."
But Messner did not believe. He remembered her facility in changing
front. She had changed front now. It was exploitation by indirection.
She was not happy with the other man. She had discovered her mistake.
The flame of his ego flared up at the thought. She wanted to come back
to him, which was the one thing he did not want. Unwittingly, his hand
rattled the door-latch.
"Don't run away," she laughed. "I won't bite you."
"I am not running away," he replied with child-like defiance, at the
same time pulling on his mittens. "I'm only going to get some water."
He gathered the empty pails and cooking pots together and opened the
door. He looked back at her.
"Don't forget you're to tell Mr.--er--Haythorne who I am."
Messner broke the skin that had formed on the water-hole within the
hour, and filled his pails. But he did not return immediately to the
cabin. Leaving the pails standing in the trail, he walked up and down,
rapidly, to keep from freezing, for the frost bit into the flesh like
fire. His beard was white with his frozen breath when the perplexed and
frowning brows relaxed and decision came into his face. He had made
up his mind to his course of action, and his frigid lips and cheeks
crackled into a chuckle over it. The pails were already skinned over
with young ice when he picked them up and made for the cabin.
When he entered he found the other man waiting, standing near the
stove, a certain stiff awkwardness and indecision in his manner.
Messner set down his water-pails.
"Glad to meet you, Graham Womble," he said in conventional tones, as
though acknowledging an introduction.
Messner did not offer his hand. Womble stirred uneasily, feeling for
the other the hatred one is prone to feel for one he has wronged.
"And so you're the chap," Messner said in marvelling accents. "Well,
well. You see, I really am glad to meet you. I have been--er--curious
to know what Theresa found in you--where, I may say, the attraction
lay. Well, well."
And he looked the other up and down as a man would look a horse up and
down.
"I know how you must feel about me," Womble began.
"Don't mention it," Messner broke in with exaggerated cordiality of
voice and manner. "Never mind that. What I want to know is how do you
find her? Up to expectations? Has she worn well? Life been all a happy
dream ever since?"
"Don't be silly," Theresa interjected.
"I can't help being natural," Messner complained.
"You can be expedient at the same time, and practical," Womble said
sharply. "What we want to know is what are you going to do?"
Messner made a well-feigned gesture of helplessness. "I really don't
know. It is one of those impossible situations against which there can
be no provision."
"All three of us cannot remain the night in this cabin."
Messner nodded affirmation.
"Then somebody must get out."
"That also is incontrovertible," Messner agreed. "When three bodies
cannot occupy the same space at the same time, one must get out."
"And you're that one," Womble announced grimly. "It's a ten-mile pull
to the next camp, but you can make it all right."
"And that's the first flaw in your reasoning," the other objected.
"Why, necessarily, should I be the one to get out? I found this cabin
first."
"But Tess can't get out," Womble explained. "Her lungs are already
slightly chilled."
"I agree with you. She can't venture ten miles of frost. By all means
she must remain."
"Then it is as I said," Womble announced with finality.