What of her anger and pent feelings, her lungs were irritated into the
dry, hacking cough, and with blood-suffused face and one hand clenched
against her chest, she waited for the paroxysm to pass.
Womble looked gloomily at her, noting her cough.
"Something must be done," he said. "Yet her lungs can't stand the
exposure. She can't travel till the temperature rises. And I'm not
going to give her up."
Messner hemmed, cleared his throat, and hemmed again,
semi-apologetically, and said, "I need some money."
Contempt showed instantly in Womble's face. At last, beneath him in
vileness, had the other sunk himself.
"You've got a fat sack of dust," Messner went on. "I saw you unload it
from the sled."
"How much do you want?" Womble demanded, with a contempt in his voice
equal to that in his face.
"I made an estimate of the sack, and I--ah--should say it weighed about
twenty pounds. What do you say we call it four thousand?"
"But it's all I've got, man!" Womble cried out.
"You've got her," the other said soothingly. "She must be worth it.
Think what I'm giving up. Surely it is a reasonable price."
"All right." Womble rushed across the floor to the gold-sack. "Can't
put this deal through too quick for me, you--you little worm!"
"Now, there you err," was the smiling rejoinder. "As a matter of ethics
isn't the man who gives a bribe as bad as the man who takes a bribe?
The receiver is as bad as the thief, you know; and you needn't console
yourself with any fictitious moral superiority concerning this little
deal."
"To hell with your ethics!" the other burst out. "Come here and watch
the weighing of this dust. I might cheat you."
And the woman, leaning against the bunk, raging and impotent, watched
herself weighed out in yellow dust and nuggets in the scales erected on
the grub-box. The scales were small, making necessary many weighings,
and Messner with precise care verified each weighing.
"There's too much silver in it," he remarked as he tied up the
gold-sack. "I don't think it will run quite sixteen to the ounce. You
got a trifle the better of me, Womble."
He handled the sack lovingly, and with due appreciation of its
preciousness carried it out to his sled.
Returning, he gathered his pots and pans together, packed his grub-box,
and rolled up his bed. When the sled was lashed and the complaining
dogs harnessed, he returned into the cabin for his mittens.
"Good-by, Tess," he said, standing at the open door.
She turned on him, struggling for speech but too frantic to word the
passion that burned in her.
"Good-by, Tess," he repeated gently.
"Beast!" she managed to articulate.
She turned and tottered to the bunk, flinging herself face down upon
it, sobbing: "You beasts! You beasts!"
John Messner closed the door softly behind him, and, as he started
the dogs, looked back at the cabin with a great relief in his face.
At the bottom of the bank, beside the water-hole, he halted the sled.
He worked the sack of gold out between the lashings and carried it to
the water-hole. Already a new skin of ice had formed. This he broke
with his fist. Untying the knotted mouth with his teeth, he emptied
the contents of the sack into the water. The river was shallow at
that point, and two feet beneath the surface he could see the bottom
dull-yellow in the fading light. At the sight of it, he spat into the
hole.
He started the dogs along the Yukon trail. Whining spiritlessly, they
were reluctant to work. Clinging to the gee-pole with his right band
and with his left rubbing cheeks and nose, he stumbled over the rope as
the dogs swung on a bend.
"Mush-on, you poor, sore-footed brutes!" he cried. "That's it, mush-on!"