of the cabin, cooking and dish-washing for the five men of the creek.
Genuine sourdoughs (pioneers) they were, tough and hard-bitten, who had
been buried so deeply inside the Circle that they did not know there was
a Klondike Strike. The news he brought them was their first word of it.
They lived on an almost straight-meat diet of moose, caribou, and smoked
salmon, eked out with wild berries and somewhat succulent wild roots they
had stocked up with in the summer. They had forgotten the taste of
coffee, made fire with a burning glass, carried live fire-sticks with
them wherever they travelled, and in their pipes smoked dry leaves that
bit the tongue and were pungent to the nostrils.
Three years before, they had prospected from the head-reaches of the
Koyokuk northward and clear across to the mouth of the Mackenzie on the
Arctic Ocean. Here, on the whaleships, they had beheld their last white
men and equipped themselves with the last white man’s grub, consisting
principally of salt and smoking tobacco. Striking south and west on the
long traverse to the junction of the Yukon and Porcupine at Fort Yukon,
they had found gold on this creek and remained over to work the ground.
They hailed the advent of Tarwater with joy, never tired of listening to
his tales of Forty-Nine, and rechristened him Old Hero. Also, with tea
made from spruce needles, with concoctions brewed from the inner willow
bark, and with sour and bitter roots and bulbs from the ground, they
dosed his scurvy out of him, so that he ceased limping and began to lay
on flesh over his bony framework. Further, they saw no reason at all why
he should not gather a rich treasure of gold from the ground.
“Don’t know about all of three hundred thousand,” they told him one
morning, at breakfast, ere they departed to their work, “but how’d a
hundred thousand do, Old Hero? That’s what we figure a claim is worth,
the ground being badly spotted, and we’ve already staked your location
notices.”
“Well, boys,” Old Tarwater answered, “and thanking you kindly, all I can
say is that a hundred thousand will do nicely, and very nicely, for a
starter. Of course, I ain’t goin’ to stop till I get the full three
hundred thousand. That’s what I come into the country for.”
They laughed and applauded his ambition and reckoned they’d have to hunt
a richer creek for him. And Old Hero reckoned that as the spring came on
and he grew spryer, he’d have to get out and do a little snooping around
himself.
“For all anybody knows,” he said, pointing to a hillside across the creek
bottom, “the moss under the snow there may be plumb rooted in nugget
gold.”
He said no more, but as the sun rose higher and the days grew longer and
warmer, he gazed often across the creek at the definite bench-formation
half way up the hill. And, one day, when the thaw was in full swing, he
crossed the stream and climbed to the bench. Exposed patches of ground
had already thawed an inch deep. On one such patch he stopped, gathered
a bunch of moss in his big gnarled hands, and ripped it out by the roots.
The sun smouldered on dully glistening yellow. He shook the handful of
moss, and coarse nuggets, like gravel, fell to the ground. It was the
Golden Fleece ready for the shearing.
Not entirely unremembered in Alaskan annals is the summer stampede of
1898 from Fort Yukon to the bench diggings of Tarwater Hill. And when
Tarwater sold his holdings to the Bowdie interests for a sheer
half-million and faced for California, he rode a mule over a new-cut
trail, with convenient road houses along the way, clear to the steamboat
landing at Fort Yukon.
At the first meal on the ocean-going steamship out of St. Michaels, a
waiter, greyish-haired, pain-ravaged of face, scurvy-twisted of body,
served him. Old Tarwater was compelled to look him over twice in order
to make certain he was Charles Crayton.
“Got it bad, eh, son?” Tarwater queried.
“Just my luck,” the other complained, after recognition and greeting.
“Only one of the party that the scurvy attacked. I’ve been through hell.
The other three are all at work and healthy, getting grub-stake to
prospect up White River this winter. Anson’s earning twenty-five a day
at carpentering, Liverpool getting twenty logging for the saw-mill, and
Big Bill’s getting forty a day as chief sawyer. I tried my best, and if
it hadn’t been for scurvy . . .”
“Sure, son, you done your best, which ain’t much, you being naturally
irritable and hard from too much business. Now I’ll tell you what. You
ain’t fit to work crippled up this way. I’ll pay your passage with the
captain in kind remembrance of the voyage you gave me, and you can lay up
and take it easy the rest of the trip. And what are your circumstances
when you land at San Francisco?”
Charles Crayton shrugged his shoulders.
“Tell you what,” Tarwater continued. “There’s work on the ranch for you
till you can start business again.”
“I could manage your business for you—” Charles began eagerly.
“No, siree,” Tarwater declared emphatically. “But there’s always
post-holes to dig, and cordwood to chop, and the climate’s fine . . . ”
Tarwater arrived home a true prodigal grandfather for whom the fatted
calf was killed and ready. But first, ere he sat down at table, he must
stroll out and around. And sons and daughters of his flesh and of the
law needs must go with him fulsomely eating out of the gnarled old hand
that had half a million to disburse. He led the way, and no opinion he
slyly uttered was preposterous or impossible enough to draw dissent from
his following. Pausing by the ruined water wheel which he had built from
the standing timber, his face beamed as he gazed across the stretches of
Tarwater Valley, and on and up the far heights to the summit of Tarwater
Mountain—now all his again.
A thought came to him that made him avert his face and blow his nose in
order to hide the twinkle in his eyes. Still attended by the entire
family, he strolled on to the dilapidated barn. He picked up an
age-weathered single-tree from the ground.
“William,” he said. “Remember that little conversation we had just
before I started to Klondike? Sure, William, you remember. You told me
I was crazy. And I said my father’d have walloped the tar out of me with
a single-tree if I’d spoke to him that way.”
“Aw, but that was only foolin’,” William temporized.
William was a grizzled man of forty-five, and his wife and grown sons
stood in the group, curiously watching Grandfather Tarwater take off his
coat and hand it to Mary to hold.
“William—come here,” he commanded imperatively.
No matter how reluctantly, William came.
“Just a taste, William, son, of what my father give me often enough,” Old
Tarwater crooned, as he laid on his son’s back and shoulders with the
single-tree. “Observe, I ain’t hitting you on the head. My father had a
gosh-wollickin’ temper and never drew the line at heads when he went
after tar.—Don’t jerk your elbows back that way! You’re likely to get a
crack on one by accident. And just tell me one thing, William, son: is
there nary notion in your head that I’m crazy?”
“No!” William yelped out in pain, as he danced about. “You ain’t crazy,
father of course you ain’t crazy!”
“You said it,” Old Tarwater remarked sententiously, tossing the
single-tree aside and starting to struggle into his coat. “Now let’s all
go in and eat.”
THE END.
Glen Ellen, California,
_September_ 14, 1916.
THE PRINCESS
A FIRE burned cheerfully in the jungle camp, and beside the fire lolled a
cheerful-seeming though horrible-appearing man. This was a hobo jungle,
pitched in a thin strip of woods that lay between a railroad embankment
and the bank of a river. But no hobo was the man. So deep-sunk was he
in the social abyss that a proper hobo would not sit by the same fire
with him. A gay-cat, who is an ignorant new-comer on the “Road,” might
sit with such as he, but only long enough to learn better. Even low down
bindle-stiffs and stew-bums, after a once-over, would have passed this
man by. A genuine hobo, a couple of punks, or a bunch of tender-yeared
road-kids might have gone through his rags for any stray pennies or
nickels and kicked him out into the darkness. Even an alki-stiff would
have reckoned himself immeasurably superior.
For this man was that hybrid of tramp-land, an alki-stiff that has
degenerated into a stew-bum, with so little self-respect that he will
never “boil-up,” and with so little pride that he will eat out of a
garbage can. He was truly horrible-appearing. He might have been sixty
years of age; he might have been ninety. His garments might have been
discarded by a rag-picker. Beside him, an unrolled bundle showed itself
as consisting of a ragged overcoat and containing an empty and
smoke-blackened tomato can, an empty and battered condensed milk can,
some dog-meat partly wrapped in brown paper and evidently begged from
some butcher-shop, a carrot that had been run over in the street by a
wagon-wheel, three greenish-cankered and decayed potatoes, and a
sugar-bun with a mouthful bitten from it and rescued from the gutter, as
was made patent by the gutter-filth that still encrusted it.
A prodigious growth of whiskers, greyish-dirty and untrimmed for years,
sprouted from his face. This hirsute growth should have been white, but
the season was summer and it had not been exposed to a rain-shower for
some time. What was visible of the face looked as if at some period it
had stopped a hand-grenade. The nose was so variously malformed in its
healed brokenness that there was no bridge, while one nostril, the size
of a pea, opened downward, and the other, the size of a robin’s egg,
tilted upward to the sky. One eye, of normal size, dim-brown and misty,
bulged to the verge of popping out, and as if from senility wept
copiously and continuously. The other eye, scarcely larger than a
squirrel’s and as uncannily bright, twisted up obliquely into the hairy
scar of a bone-crushed eyebrow. And he had but one arm.
Yet was he cheerful. On his face, in mild degree, was depicted sensuous
pleasure as he lethargically scratched his ribs with his one hand. He
pawed over his food-scraps, debated, then drew a twelve-ounce druggist
bottle from his inside coat-pocket. The bottle was full of a colourless
liquid, the contemplation of which made his little eye burn brighter and
quickened his movements. Picking up the tomato can, he arose, went down
the short path to the river, and returned with the can filled with
not-nice river water. In the condensed milk can he mixed one part of
water with two parts of fluid from the bottle. This colourless fluid was
druggist’s alcohol, and as such is known in tramp-land as “alki.”
Slow footsteps, coming down the side of the railroad embankment, alarmed
him ere he could drink. Placing the can carefully upon the ground
between his legs, he covered it with his hat and waited anxiously
whatever impended.
Out of the darkness emerged a man as filthy ragged as he. The new-comer,
who might have been fifty, and might have been sixty, was grotesquely
fat. He bulged everywhere. He was composed of bulges. His bulbous nose
was the size and shape of a turnip. His eyelids bulged and his blue eyes
bulged in competition with them. In many places the seams of his
garments had parted across the bulges of body. His calves grew into his
feet, for the broken elastic sides of his Congress gaiters were swelled
full with the fat of him. One arm only he sported, from the shoulder of
which was suspended a small and tattered bundle with the mud caked dry on
the outer covering from the last place he had pitched his doss. He
advanced with tentative caution, made sure of the harmlessness of the man
beside the fire, and joined him.
“Hello, grandpa,” the new-comer greeted, then paused to stare at the
other’s flaring, sky-open nostril. “Say, Whiskers, how’d ye keep the
night dew out of that nose o’ yourn?”
Whiskers growled an incoherence deep in his throat and spat into the fire
in token that he was not pleased by the question.
“For the love of Mike,” the fat man chuckled, “if you got caught out in a
rainstorm without an umbrella you’d sure drown, wouldn’t you?”
“Can it, Fatty, can it,” Whiskers muttered wearily. “They ain’t nothin’
new in that line of chatter. Even the bulls hand it out to me.”
“But you can still drink, I hope”; Fatty at the same time mollified and
invited, with his one hand deftly pulling the slip-knots that fastened
his bundle.
From within the bundle he brought to light a twelve-ounce bottle of alki.
Footsteps coming down the embankment alarmed him, and he hid the bottle
under his hat on the ground between his legs.
But the next comer proved to be not merely one of their own ilk, but
likewise to have only one arm. So forbidding of aspect was he that
greetings consisted of no more than grunts. Huge-boned, tall, gaunt to
cadaverousness, his face a dirty death’s head, he was as repellent a
nightmare of old age as ever Doré imagined. His toothless, thin-lipped
mouth was a cruel and bitter slash under a great curved nose that almost
met the chin and that was like a buzzard’s beak. His one hand, lean and
crooked, was a talon. The beady grey eyes, unblinking and unwavering,
were bitter as death, as bleak as absolute zero and as merciless. His
presence was a chill, and Whiskers and Fatty instinctively drew together
for protection against the unguessed threat of him. Watching his chance,
privily, Whiskers snuggled a chunk of rock several pounds in weigh close
to his hand if need for action should arise. Fatty duplicated the
performance.
Then both sat licking their lips, guiltily embarrassed, while the
unblinking eyes of the terrible one bored into them, now into one, now
into another, and then down at the rock-chunks of their preparedness.
“Huh!” sneered the terrible one, with such dreadfulness of menace as to
cause Whiskers and Fatty involuntarily to close their hands down on their
cave-man’s weapons.
“Huh!” the other repeated, reaching his one talon into his side coat
pocket with swift definiteness. “A hell of a chance you two cheap bums
’d have with me.”
The talon emerged, clutching ready for action a six-pound iron quoit.
“We ain’t lookin’ for trouble, Slim,” Fatty quavered.
“Who in hell are you to call me ‘Slim’?” came the snarling answer.
“Me? I’m just Fatty, an’ seein’ ’s I never seen you before—”
“An’ I suppose that’s Whiskers, there, with the gay an’ festive lamp
tan-going into his eyebrow an’ the God-forgive-us nose joy-riding all
over his mug?”
“It’ll do, it’ll do,” Whiskers muttered uncomfortably. “One monica’s as
good as another, I find, at my time of life. And everybody hands it out
to me anyway. And I need an umbrella when it rains to keep from getting
drowned, an’ all the rest of it.”
“I ain’t used to company—don’t like it,” Slim growled. “So if you guys
want to stick around, mind your step, that’s all, mind your step.”
He fished from his pocket a cigar stump, self-evidently shot from the
gutter, and prepared to put it in his mouth to chew. Then he changed his
mind, glared at his companions savagely, and unrolled his bundle.
Appeared in his hand a druggist’s bottle of alki.
“Well,” he snarled, “I suppose I gotta give you cheap skates a drink when
I ain’t got more’n enough for a good petrification for myself.”
Almost a softening flicker of light was imminent in his withered face as
he beheld the others proudly lift their hats and exhibit their own
supplies.
“Here’s some water for the mixin’s,” Whiskers said, proffering his
tomato-can of river slush. “Stockyards just above,” he added
apologetically. “But they say—”
“Huh!” Slim snapped short, mixing the drink. “I’ve drunk worse’n
stockyards in my time.”
Yet when all was ready, cans of alki in their solitary hands, the three
things that had once been men hesitated, as if of old habit, and next
betrayed shame as if at self-exposure.
Whiskers was the first to brazen it.
“I’ve sat in at many a finer drinking,” he bragged.
“With the pewter,” Slim sneered.
“With the silver,” Whiskers corrected.
Slim turned a scorching eye-interrogation on Fatty.
Fatty nodded.
“Beneath the salt,” said Slim.
“Above it,” came Fatty’s correction. “I was born above it, and I’ve
never travelled second class. First or steerage, but no intermediate in
mine.”
“Yourself?” Whiskers queried of Slim.
“In broken glass to the Queen, God bless her,” Slim answered, solemnly,
without snarl or sneer.
“In the pantry?” Fatty insinuated.
Simultaneously Slim reached for his quoit, and Whiskers and Fatty for
their rocks.
“Now don’t let’s get feverish,” Fatty said, dropping his own weapon. “We
aren’t scum. We’re gentlemen. Let’s drink like gentlemen.”
“Let it be a real drinking,” Whiskers approved.
“Let’s get petrified,” Slim agreed. “Many a distillery’s flowed under
the bridge since we were gentlemen; but let’s forget the long road we’ve
travelled since, and hit our doss in the good old fashion in which every
gentleman went to bed when we were young.”
“My father done it—did it,” Fatty concurred and corrected, as old
recollections exploded long-sealed brain-cells of connotation and correct
usage.
The other two nodded a descent from similar fathers, and elevated their
tin cans of alcohol.
* * * * *
By the time each had finished his own bottle and from his rags fished
forth a second one, their brains were well-mellowed and a-glow, although
they had not got around to telling their real names. But their English
had improved. They spoke it correctly, while the argo of tramp-land
ceased from their lips.
“It’s my constitution,” Whiskers was explaining. “Very few men could go
through what I have and live to tell the tale. And I never took any care
of myself. If what the moralists and the physiologists say were true,
I’d have been dead long ago. And it’s the same with you two. Look at
us, at our advanced years, carousing as the young ones don’t dare,
sleeping out in the open on the ground, never sheltered from frost nor
rain nor storm, never afraid of pneumonia or rheumatism that would put
half the young ones on their backs in hospital.”
He broke off to mix another drink, and Fatty took up the tale.
“And we’ve had our fun,” he boasted, “and speaking of sweethearts and
all,” he cribbed from Kipling, “‘We’ve rogued and we’ve ranged—’”
“‘In our time,’” Slim completed the crib for him.
“I should say so, I should say so,” Fatty confirmed. “And been loved by
princesses—at least I have.”
“Go on and tell us about it,” Whiskers urged. “The night’s young, and
why shouldn’t we remember back to the roofs of kings?”
Nothing loth, Fatty cleared his throat for the recital and cast about in
his mind for the best way to begin.
“It must be known that I came of good family. Percival Delaney, let us
say, yes, let us say Percival Delaney, was not unknown at Oxford once
upon a time—not for scholarship, I am frank to admit; but the gay young
dogs of that day, if any be yet alive, would remember him—”
“My people came over with the Conqueror,” Whiskers interrupted, extending
his hand to Fatty’s in acknowledgment of the introduction.
“What name?” Fatty queried. “I did not seem quite to catch it.”
“Delarouse, Chauncey Delarouse. The name will serve as well as any.”
Both completed the handshake and glanced to Slim.
“Oh, well, while we’re about it . . . ” Fatty urged.
“Bruce Cadogan Cavendish,” Slim growled morosely. “Go on, Percival, with
your princesses and the roofs of kings.”
“Oh, I was a rare young devil,” Percival obliged, “after I played ducks
and drakes at home and sported out over the world. And I was some figure
of a man before I lost my shape—polo, steeple-chasing, boxing. I won
medals at buckjumping in Australia, and I held more than several swimming
records from the quarter of a mile up. Women turned their heads to look
when I went by. The women! God bless them!”
And Fatty, alias Percival Delaney, a grotesque of manhood, put his bulgy
hand to his puffed lips and kissed audibly into the starry vault of the
sky.
“And the Princess!” he resumed, with another kiss to the stars. “She was
as fine a figure of a woman as I was a man, as high-spirited and
courageous, as reckless and dare-devilish. Lord, Lord, in the water she
was a mermaid, a sea-goddess. And when it came to blood, beside her I
was parvenu. Her royal line traced back into the mists of antiquity.
“She was not a daughter of a fair-skinned folk. Tawny golden was she,
with golden-brown eyes, and her hair that fell to her knees was
blue-black and straight, with just the curly tendrilly tendency that
gives to woman’s hair its charm. Oh, there were no kinks in it, any more
than were there kinks in the hair of her entire genealogy. For she was
Polynesian, glowing, golden, lovely and lovable, royal Polynesian.”
Again he paused to kiss his hand to the memory of her, and Slim, alias
Bruce Cadogan Cavendish, took advantage to interject:
“Huh! Maybe you didn’t shine in scholarship, but at least you gleaned a
vocabulary out of Oxford.”
“And in the South Seas garnered a better vocabulary from the lexicon of
Love,” Percival was quick on the uptake.
“It was the island of Talofa,” he went on, “meaning love, the Isle of
Love, and it was her island. Her father, the king, an old man, sat on
his mats with paralysed knees and drank squareface gin all day and most
of the night, out of grief, sheer grief. She, my princess, was the only
issue, her brother having been lost in their double canoe in a hurricane
while coming up from a voyage to Samoa. And among the Polynesians the
royal women have equal right with the men to rule. In fact, they trace
their genealogies always by the female line.”
To this both Chauncey Delarouse and Bruce Cadogan Cavendish nodded prompt
affirmation.
“Ah,” said Percival, “I perceive you both know the South Seas, wherefore,
without undue expenditure of verbiage on my part, I am assured that you
will appreciate the charm of my princess, the Princess Tui-nui of Talofa,
the Princess of the Isle of Love.”
He kissed his hand to her, sipped from his condensed milk can a man-size
drink of druggist’s alcohol, and to her again kissed her hand.
“But she was coy, and ever she fluttered near to me but never near
enough. When my arm went out to her to girdle her, presto, she was not
there. I knew, as never before, nor since, the thousand dear and
delightful anguishes of love frustrated but ever resilient and beckoned
on by the very goddess of love.”
“Some vocabulary,” Bruce Cadogan Cavendish muttered in aside to Chauncey
Delarouse. But Percival Delaney was not to be deterred. He kissed his
pudgy hand aloft into the night and held warmly on.
“No fond agonies of rapture deferred that were not lavished upon me by my
dear Princess, herself ever a luring delight of promise flitting just
beyond my reach. Every sweet lover’s inferno unguessed of by Dante she
led me through. Ah! Those swooning tropic nights, under our palm trees,
the distant surf a langourous murmur as from some vast sea shell of
mystery, when she, my Princess, all but melted to my yearning, and with
her laughter, that was as silver strings by buds and blossoms smitten,
all but made lunacy of my lover’s ardency.
“It was by my wrestling with the champions of Talofa that I first
interested her. It was by my prowess at swimming that I awoke her. And
it was by a certain swimming deed that I won from her more than
coquettish smiles and shy timidities of feigned retreat.
“We were squidding that day, out on the reef—you know how, undoubtedly,
diving down the face of the wall of the reef, five fathoms, ten fathoms,
any depth within reason, and shoving our squid-sticks into the likely
holes and crannies of the coral where squid might be lairing. With the
squid-stick, bluntly sharp at both ends, perhaps a foot long, and held
crosswise in the hand, the trick was to gouge any lazying squid until he
closed his tentacles around fist, stick and arm.—Then you had him, and
came to the surface with him, and hit him in the head which is in the
centre of him, and peeled him off into the waiting canoe. . . . And to
think I used to do that!”
Percival Delaney paused a moment, a glimmer of awe on his rotund face, as
he contemplated the mighty picture of his youth.