Grandfather Tarwater, after remaining properly subdued and crushed for a
quiet decade, had broken out again. This time it was the Klondike fever.
His first and one unvarying symptom of such attacks was song. One chant
only he raised, though he remembered no more than the first stanza and
but three lines of that. And the family knew his feet were itching and
his brain was tingling with the old madness, when he lifted his
hoarse-cracked voice, now falsetto-cracked, in:
Like Argus of the ancient times,
We leave this modern Greece,
Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum, tum, tum-tum,
To shear the Golden Fleece.
Ten years earlier he had lifted the chant, sung to the air of the
“Doxology,” when afflicted with the fever to go gold-mining in Patagonia.
The multitudinous family had sat upon him, but had had a hard time doing
it. When all else had failed to shake his resolution, they had applied
lawyers to him, with the threat of getting out guardianship papers and of
confining him in the state asylum for the insane—which was reasonable for
a man who had, a quarter of a century before, speculated away all but ten
meagre acres of a California principality, and who had displayed no
better business acumen ever since.
The application of lawyers to John Tarwater was like the application of a
mustard plaster. For, in his judgment, they were the gentry, more than
any other, who had skinned him out of the broad Tarwater acres. So, at
the time of his Patagonian fever, the very thought of so drastic a remedy
was sufficient to cure him. He quickly demonstrated he was not crazy by
shaking the fever from him and agreeing not to go to Patagonia.
Next, he demonstrated how crazy he really was, by deeding over to his
family, unsolicited, the ten acres on Tarwater Flat, the house, barn,
outbuildings, and water-rights. Also did he turn over the eight hundred
dollars in bank that was the long-saved salvage of his wrecked fortune.
But for this the family found no cause for committal to the asylum, since
such committal would necessarily invalidate what he had done.
“Grandfather is sure peeved,” said Mary, his oldest daughter, herself a
grandmother, when her father quit smoking.
All he had retained for himself was a span of old horses, a mountain
buckboard, and his one room in the crowded house. Further, having
affirmed that he would be beholden to none of them, he got the contract
to carry the United States mail, twice a week, from Kelterville up over
Tarwater Mountain to Old Almaden—which was a sporadically worked
quick-silver mine in the upland cattle country. With his old horses it
took all his time to make the two weekly round trips. And for ten years,
rain or shine, he had never missed a trip. Nor had he failed once to pay
his week’s board into Mary’s hand. This board he had insisted on, in the
convalescence from his Patagonian fever, and he had paid it strictly,
though he had given up tobacco in order to be able to do it.
“Huh!” he confided to the ruined water wheel of the old Tarwater Mill,
which he had built from the standing timber and which had ground wheat
for the first settlers. “Huh! They’ll never put me in the poor farm so
long as I support myself. And without a penny to my name it ain’t likely
any lawyer fellows’ll come snoopin’ around after me.”
And yet, precisely because of these highly rational acts, it was held
that John Tarwater was mildly crazy!
The first time he had lifted the chant of “Like Argus of the Ancient
Times,” had been in 1849, when, twenty-two years’ of age, violently
attacked by the Californian fever, he had sold two hundred and forty
Michigan acres, forty of it cleared, for the price of four yoke of oxen,
and a wagon, and had started across the Plains.
“And we turned off at Fort Hall, where the Oregon emigration went
north’ard, and swung south for Californy,” was his way of concluding the
narrative of that arduous journey. “And Bill Ping and me used to rope
grizzlies out of the underbrush of Cache Slough in the Sacramento
Valley.”
Years of freighting and mining had followed, and, with a stake gleaned
from the Merced placers, he satisfied the land-hunger of his race and
time by settling in Sonoma County.
During the ten years of carrying the mail across Tarwater Township, up
Tarwater Valley, and over Tarwater Mountain, most all of which land had
once been his, he had spent his time dreaming of winning back that land
before he died. And now, his huge gaunt form more erect than it had been
for years, with a glinting of blue fires in his small and close-set eyes,
he was lifting his ancient chant again.
“There he goes now—listen to him,” said William Tarwater.
“Nobody at home,” laughed Harris Topping, day labourer, husband of Annie
Tarwater, and father of her nine children.
The kitchen door opened to admit the old man, returning from feeding his
horses. The song had ceased from his lips; but Mary was irritable from a
burnt hand and a grandchild whose stomach refused to digest properly
diluted cows’ milk.
“Now there ain’t no use you carryin’ on that way, father,” she tackled
him. “The time’s past for you to cut and run for a place like the
Klondike, and singing won’t buy you nothing.”
“Just the same,” he answered quietly. “I bet I could go to that Klondike
place and pick up enough gold to buy back the Tarwater lands.”
“Old fool!” Annie contributed.
“You couldn’t buy them back for less’n three hundred thousand and then
some,” was William’s effort at squelching him.
“Then I could pick up three hundred thousand, and then some, if I was
only there,” the old man retorted placidly.
“Thank God you can’t walk there, or you’d be startin’, I know,” Mary
cried. “Ocean travel costs money.”
“I used to have money,” her father said humbly.
“Well, you ain’t got any now—so forget it,” William advised. “Them times
is past, like roping bear with Bill Ping. There ain’t no more bear.”
“Just the same—”
But Mary cut him off. Seizing the day’s paper from the kitchen table,
she flourished it savagely under her aged progenitor’s nose.
“What do those Klondikers say? There it is in cold print. Only the
young and robust can stand the Klondike. It’s worse than the north pole.
And they’ve left their dead a-plenty there themselves. Look at their
pictures. You’re forty years older ’n the oldest of them.”
John Tarwater did look, but his eyes strayed to other photographs on the
highly sensational front page.
“And look at the photys of them nuggets they brought down,” he said. “I
know gold. Didn’t I gopher twenty thousand outa the Merced? And
wouldn’t it a-ben a hundred thousand if that cloudburst hadn’t busted my
wing-dam? Now if I was only in the Klondike—”
“Crazy as a loon,” William sneered in open aside to the rest.
“A nice way to talk to your father,” Old Man Tarwater censured mildly.
“My father’d have walloped the tar out of me with a single-tree if I’d
spoke to him that way.”
“But you _are_ crazy, father—” William began.
“Reckon you’re right, son. And that’s where my father wasn’t crazy.
He’d a-done it.”
“The old man’s been reading some of them magazine articles about men who
succeeded after forty,” Annie jibed.
“And why not, daughter?” he asked. “And why can’t a man succeed after
he’s seventy? I was only seventy this year. And mebbe I could succeed
if only I could get to the Klondike—”
“Which you ain’t going to get to,” Mary shut him off.
“Oh, well, then,” he sighed, “seein’s I ain’t, I might just as well go to
bed.”
He stood up, tall, gaunt, great-boned and gnarled, a splendid ruin of a
man. His ragged hair and whiskers were not grey but snowy white, as were
the tufts of hair that stood out on the backs of his huge bony fingers.
He moved toward the door, opened it, sighed, and paused with a backward
look.
“Just the same,” he murmured plaintively, “the bottoms of my feet is
itching something terrible.”
Long before the family stirred next morning, his horses fed and harnessed
by lantern light, breakfast cooked and eaten by lamp fight, Old Man
Tarwater was off and away down Tarwater Valley on the road to
Kelterville. Two things were unusual about this usual trip which he had
made a thousand and forty times since taking the mail contract. He did
not drive to Kelterville, but turned off on the main road south to Santa
Rosa. Even more remarkable than this was the paper-wrapped parcel
between his feet. It contained his one decent black suit, which Mary had
been long reluctant to see him wear any more, not because it was shabby,
but because, as he guessed what was at the back of her mind, it was
decent enough to bury him in.
And at Santa Rosa, in a second-hand clothes shop, he sold the suit
outright for two dollars and a half. From the same obliging shopman he
received four dollars for the wedding ring of his long-dead wife. The
span of horses and the wagon he disposed of for seventy-five dollars,
although twenty-five was all he received down in cash. Chancing to meet
Alton Granger on the street, to whom never before had he mentioned the
ten dollars loaned him in ’74, he reminded Alton Granger of the little
affair, and was promptly paid. Also, of all unbelievable men to be in
funds, he so found the town drunkard for whom he had bought many a drink
in the old and palmy days. And from him John Tarwater borrowed a dollar.
Finally, he took the afternoon train to San Francisco.
A dozen days later, carrying a half-empty canvas sack of blankets and old
clothes, he landed on the beach of Dyea in the thick of the great
Klondike Rush. The beach was screaming bedlam. Ten thousand tons of
outfit lay heaped and scattered, and twice ten thousand men struggled
with it and clamoured about it. Freight, by Indian-back, over Chilcoot
to Lake Linderman, had jumped from sixteen to thirty cents a pound, which
latter was a rate of six hundred dollars a ton. And the sub-arctic
winter gloomed near at hand. All knew it, and all knew that of the
twenty thousand of them very few would get across the passes, leaving the
rest to winter and wait for the late spring thaw.
Such the beach old John Tarwater stepped upon; and straight across the
beach and up the trail toward Chilcoot he headed, cackling his ancient
chant, a very Grandfather Argus himself, with no outfit worry in the
world, for he did not possess any outfit. That night he slept on the
flats, five miles above Dyea, at the head of canoe navigation. Here the
Dyea River became a rushing mountain torrent, plunging out of a dark
canyon from the glaciers that fed it far above.
And here, early next morning, he beheld a little man weighing no more
than a hundred, staggering along a foot-log under all of a hundred pounds
of flour strapped on his back. Also, he beheld the little man stumble
off the log and fall face-downward in a quiet eddy where the water was
two feet deep and proceed quietly to drown. It was no desire of his to
take death so easily, but the flour on his back weighed as much as he and
would not let him up.
“Thank you, old man,” he said to Tarwater, when the latter had dragged
him up into the air and ashore.
While he unlaced his shoes and ran the water out, they had further talk.
Next, he fished out a ten-dollar gold-piece and offered it to his
rescuer.
Old Tarwater shook his head and shivered, for the ice-water had wet him
to his knees.
“But I reckon I wouldn’t object to settin’ down to a friendly meal with
you.”
“Ain’t had breakfast?” the little man, who was past forty and who had
said his name was Anson, queried with a glance frankly curious.
“Nary bite,” John Tarwater answered.
“Where’s your outfit? Ahead?”
“Nary outfit.”
“Expect to buy your grub on the Inside?”
“Nary a dollar to buy it with, friend. Which ain’t so important as a
warm bite of breakfast right now.”
In Anson’s camp, a quarter of a mile on, Tarwater found a slender,
red-whiskered young man of thirty cursing over a fire of wet willow wood.
Introduced as Charles, he transferred his scowl and wrath to Tarwater,
who, genially oblivious, devoted himself to the fire, took advantage of
the chill morning breeze to create a draught which the other had left
stupidly blocked by stones, and soon developed less smoke and more flame.
The third member of the party, Bill Wilson, or Big Bill as they called
him, came in with a hundred-and-forty-pound pack; and what Tarwater
esteemed to be a very rotten breakfast was dished out by Charles. The
mush was half cooked and mostly burnt, the bacon was charred carbon, and
the coffee was unspeakable.
Immediately the meal was wolfed down the three partners took their empty
pack-straps and headed down trail to where the remainder of their outfit
lay at the last camp a mile away. And old Tarwater became busy. He
washed the dishes, foraged dry wood, mended a broken pack-strap, put an
edge on the butcher-knife and camp-axe, and repacked the picks and
shovels into a more carryable parcel.
What had impressed him during the brief breakfast was the sort of awe in
which Anson and Big Bill stood of Charles. Once, during the morning,
while Anson took a breathing spell after bringing in another
hundred-pound pack, Tarwater delicately hinted his impression.
“You see, it’s this way,” Anson said. “We’ve divided our leadership.
We’ve got specialities. Now I’m a carpenter. When we get to Lake
Linderman, and the trees are chopped and whipsawed into planks, I’ll boss
the building of the boat. Big Bill is a logger and miner. So he’ll boss
getting out the logs and all mining operations. Most of our outfit’s
ahead. We went broke paying the Indians to pack that much of it to the
top of Chilcoot. Our last partner is up there with it, moving it along
by himself down the other side. His name’s Liverpool, and he’s a sailor.
So, when the boat’s built, he’s the boss of the outfit to navigate the
lakes and rapids to Klondike.
“And Charles—this Mr. Crayton—what might his speciality be?” Tarwater
asked.
“He’s the business man. When it comes to business and organization he’s
boss.”
“Hum,” Tarwater pondered. “Very lucky to get such a bunch of
specialities into one outfit.”
“More than luck,” Anson agreed. “It was all accident, too. Each of us
started alone. We met on the steamer coming up from San Francisco, and
formed the party.—Well, I got to be goin’. Charles is liable to get
kicking because I ain’t packin’ my share’ just the same, you can’t expect
a hundred-pound man to pack as much as a hundred-and-sixty-pounder.”
“Stick around and cook us something for dinner,” Charles, on his next
load in and noting the effects of the old man’s handiness, told Tarwater.
And Tarwater cooked a dinner that was a dinner, washed the dishes, had
real pork and beans for supper, and bread baked in a frying-pan that was
so delectable that the three partners nearly foundered themselves on it.
Supper dishes washed, he cut shavings and kindling for a quick and
certain breakfast fire, showed Anson a trick with foot-gear that was
invaluable to any hiker, sang his “Like Argus of the Ancient Times,” and
told them of the great emigration across the Plains in Forty-nine.
“My goodness, the first cheerful and hearty-like camp since we hit the
beach,” Big Bill remarked as he knocked out his pipe and began pulling
off his shoes for bed.
“Kind of made things easy, boys, eh?” Tarwater queried genially.
All nodded. “Well, then, I got a proposition, boys. You can take it or
leave it, but just listen kindly to it. You’re in a hurry to get in
before the freeze-up. Half the time is wasted over the cooking by one of
you that he might be puttin’ in packin’ outfit. If I do the cookin’ for
you, you all’ll get on that much faster. Also, the cookin’ ’ll be
better, and that’ll make you pack better. And I can pack quite a bit
myself in between times, quite a bit, yes, sir, quite a bit.”
Big Bill and Anson were just beginning to nod their heads in agreement,
when Charles stopped them.
“What do you expect of us in return?” he demanded of the old man.
“Oh, I leave it up to the boys.”
“That ain’t business,” Charles reprimanded sharply. “You made the
proposition. Now finish it.”
“Well, it’s this way—”
“You expect us to feed you all winter, eh?” Charles interrupted.
“No, siree, I don’t. All I reckon is a passage to Klondike in your boat
would be mighty square of you.”
“You haven’t an ounce of grub, old man. You’ll starve to death when you
get there.”
“I’ve been feedin’ some long time pretty successful,” Old Tarwater
replied, a whimsical light in his eyes. “I’m seventy, and ain’t starved
to death never yet.”
“Will you sign a paper to the effect that you shift for yourself as soon
as you get to Dawson?” the business one demanded.
“Oh, sure,” was the response.
Again Charles checked his two partners’ expressions of satisfaction with
the arrangement.
“One other thing, old man. We’re a party of four, and we all have a vote
on questions like this. Young Liverpool is ahead with the main outfit.
He’s got a say so, and he isn’t here to say it.”
“What kind of a party might he be?” Tarwater inquired.
“He’s a rough-neck sailor, and he’s got a quick, bad temper.”
“Some turbulent,” Anson contributed.
“And the way he can cuss is simply God-awful,” Big Bill testified.
“But he’s square,” Big Bill added.
Anson nodded heartily to this appraisal.
“Well, boys,” Tarwater summed up, “I set out for Californy and I got
there. And I’m going to get to Klondike. Ain’t a thing can stop me,
ain’t a thing. I’m going to get three hundred thousand outa the ground,
too. Ain’t a thing can stop me, ain’t a thing, because I just naturally
need the money. I don’t mind a bad temper so long’s the boy is square.
I’ll take my chance, an’ I’ll work along with you till we catch up with
him. Then, if he says no to the proposition, I reckon I’ll lose. But
somehow I just can’t see ’m sayin’ no, because that’d mean too close up
to freeze-up and too late for me to find another chance like this. And,
as I’m sure going to get to Klondike, it’s just plumb impossible for him
to say no.”
Old John Tarwater became a striking figure on a trail unusually replete
with striking figures. With thousands of men, each back-tripping half a
ton of outfit, retracing every mile of the trail twenty times, all came
to know him and to hail him as “Father Christmas.” And, as he worked,
ever he raised his chant with his age-falsetto voice. None of the three
men he had joined could complain about his work. True, his joints were
stiff—he admitted to a trifle of rheumatism. He moved slowly, and seemed
to creak and crackle when he moved; but he kept on moving. Last into the
blankets at night, he was first out in the morning, so that the other
three had hot coffee before their one before-breakfast pack. And,
between breakfast and dinner and between dinner and supper, he always
managed to back-trip for several packs himself. Sixty pounds was the
limit of his burden, however. He could manage seventy-five, but he could
not keep it up. Once, he tried ninety, but collapsed on the trail and
was seriously shaky for a couple of days afterward.
Work! On a trail where hard-working men learned for the first time what
work was, no man worked harder in proportion to his strength than Old
Tarwater. Driven desperately on by the near-thrust of winter, and lured
madly on by the dream of gold, they worked to their last ounce of
strength and fell by the way. Others, when failure made certain, blew
out their brains. Some went mad, and still others, under the irk of the
man-destroying strain, broke partnerships and dissolved life-time
friendships with fellows just as good as themselves and just as strained
and mad.
Work! Old Tarwater could shame them all, despite his creaking and
crackling and the nasty hacking cough he had developed. Early and late,
on trail or in camp beside the trail he was ever in evidence, ever busy
at something, ever responsive to the hail of “Father Christmas.” Weary
back-trippers would rest their packs on a log or rock alongside of where
he rested his, and would say: “Sing us that song of yourn, dad, about
Forty-Nine.” And, when he had wheezingly complied, they would arise
under their loads, remark that it was real heartening, and hit the
forward trail again.
“If ever a man worked his passage and earned it,” Big Bill confided to
his two partners, “that man’s our old Skeezicks.”
“You bet,” Anson confirmed. “He’s a valuable addition to the party, and
I, for one, ain’t at all disagreeable to the notion of making him a
regular partner—”
“None of that!” Charles Crayton cut in. “When we get to Dawson we’re
quit of him—that’s the agreement. We’d only have to bury him if we let
him stay on with us. Besides, there’s going to be a famine, and every
ounce of grub’ll count. Remember, we’re feeding him out of our own
supply all the way in. And if we run short in the pinch next year,
you’ll know the reason. Steamboats can’t get up grub to Dawson till the
middle of June, and that’s nine months away.”
“Well, you put as much money and outfit in as the rest of us,” Big Bill
conceded, “and you’ve a say according.”
“And I’m going to have my say,” Charles asserted with increasing
irritability. “And it’s lucky for you with your fool sentiments that
you’ve got somebody to think ahead for you, else you’d all starve to
death. I tell you that famine’s coming. I’ve been studying the
situation. Flour will be two dollars a pound, or ten, and no sellers.
You mark my words.”
Across the rubble-covered flats, up the dark canyon to Sheep Camp, past
the over-hanging and ever-threatening glaciers to the Scales, and from
the Scales up the steep pitches of ice-scoured rock where packers climbed
with hands and feet, Old Tarwater camp-cooked and packed and sang. He
blew across Chilcoot Pass, above timberline, in the first swirl of autumn
snow. Those below, without firewood, on the bitter rim of Crater Lake,
heard from the driving obscurity above them a weird voice chanting:
“Like Argus of the ancient times,
We leave this modern Greece,
Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum, tum, tum-tum,
To shear the Golden Fleece.”
And out of the snow flurries they saw appear a tall, gaunt form, with
whiskers of flying white that blended with the storm, bending under a
sixty-pound pack of camp dunnage.
“Father Christmas!” was the hail. And then: “Three rousing cheers for
Father Christmas!”
Two miles beyond Crater Lake lay Happy Camp—so named because here was
found the uppermost fringe of the timber line, where men might warm
themselves by fire again. Scarcely could it be called timber, for it was
a dwarf rock-spruce that never raised its loftiest branches higher than a
foot above the moss, and that twisted and grovelled like a pig-vegetable
under the moss. Here, on the trail leading into Happy Camp, in the first
sunshine of half a dozen days, Old Tarwater rested his pack against a
huge boulder and caught his breath. Around this boulder the trail
passed, laden men toiling slowly forward and men with empty pack-straps
limping rapidly back for fresh loads. Twice Old Tarwater essayed to rise
and go on, and each time, warned by his shakiness, sank back to recover
more strength. From around the boulder he heard voices in greeting,
recognized Charles Crayton’s voice, and realized that at last they had
met up with Young Liverpool. Quickly, Charles plunged into business, and
Tarwater heard with great distinctness every word of Charles’
unflattering description of him and the proposition to give him passage
to Dawson.
“A dam fool proposition,” was Liverpool’s judgment, when Charles had
concluded. “An old granddad of seventy! If he’s on his last legs, why
in hell did you hook up with him? If there’s going to be a famine, and
it looks like it, we need every ounce of grub for ourselves. We only
out-fitted for four, not five.”
“It’s all right,” Tarwater heard Charles assuring the other. “Don’t get
excited. The old codger agreed to leave the final decision to you when
we caught up with you. All you’ve got to do is put your foot down and
say no.”
“You mean it’s up to me to turn the old one down, after your encouraging
him and taking advantage of his work clear from Dyea here?”
“It’s a hard trail, Liverpool, and only the men that are hard will get
through,” Charles strove to palliate.
“And I’m to do the dirty work?” Liverpool complained, while Tarwater’s
heart sank.
“That’s just about the size of it,” Charles said. “You’ve got the
deciding.”