OUTFITTING AT CIRCLE
In the great hall everything was as quiet as the faces on the totem
poles that reared their ugliness into the air on either side of the
Grand Palace Hotel. While the night before had been the most exciting of
any that the oldest pioneers of Circle could remember since the days of
’94, in the broad light of the morning after, it seemed as though “the
makin’s of it had just melted away,” as Bill expressed it.
The boys found Doc Marling in the ‘office’ of his hotel which meant that
he was standing back of the register and ink-bottle. He greeted his
paying guests mournfully and when Jack inquired what he had on his young
mind that grieved him he pointed to the frame-work which had held the
largest mirror north of Dawson so short a time before as yesterday. It
only went to prove how fragile are mirrors and the mutability of things
in general.
“My lookin’-glass is busted,” he said funeral-like, “and I’m out just
three hundred cold dollars in gold.”
“I don’t see how you could blame us because a patron of yours thought
he’d let daylight through me. Black Pete started it and it’s up to you
to make him settle for it,” suggested Jack.
“He hasn’t got anything to settle with; that’s the worst part of it,” he
replied, fishing.
“Then you orter take it gentle-like outen his hide.” This from Bill.
“Well, I kinda allowed that you about did that thing last night,” said
Doc, “and bein’ somewhat of a philosopher I allowed too that while the
glass was worth three hundred dollars it was worth well nigh that amount
in gold dust to see him take his medicine.”
“That’s a pleasant way to look at it, Mr. Marling, and now,” said Jack,
“we want you to tell us which of these stores here is the best place to
buy our outfit.”
“They’re all all right. But you ought to go and make the acquaintance of
Jack McQuesten over there at the _N. C._ (_Northern Commercial
Company’s_) store. He is the daddy of Circle for he set up a tradin’
post here as soon as the pioneer prospectors begin to come in. Jack’s a
man that seventeen dog-sleds loaded with moosehide sacks of gold
couldn’t budge from the straight and unerrin’ path of rectitude, is
Jack, and he’ll fix you lads up bully and O. K.,” he told them.
So the boys went over to the _N. C._, and while Jack McQuesten’s fame
had reached them down as far as Skagway, Bill Adams’ fame had preceded
them that morning from the hotel. The old trader was sitting on a box
when they came in and they saw right away that he was a pioneer of the
old school. A low, broad brimmed hat, without a dent or crease in it,
set squarely on his head, and a pair of keen gray eyes, about half
closed as if he didn’t want to see too much at a time, was boring holes
through them.
He was full-faced, his nose was broad and his mustache gray; it was
plain to be seen why he had been entrusted with hundreds of thousands of
dollars by the various companies whose trading posts were famous all
over Alaska. He was, as Doc Marling had said, as straight as a die and
he knew character, even as characters knew him. He was dressed like a
miner and the only outstanding feature of his rig that the boys caught
sight of was a magnificent gold watch chain and charm--and he had a
watch to match them in his pocket--which had been presented to him by
the _Order of Pioneers_, for of the first of the hardy pioneers of
Alaska, he was the very first.
“Mr. McQuesten,” began Jack, “we came over to get a winter’s supply of
grub and an outfit fit for an arctic expedition.”
Jack McQuesten took a good look at Bill and said with a twinkle in his
eye, “so you are the young chap that whipped Black Pete--well I’ll be
dog-goned. But let me give you a pointer, be careful how you handle him
for his ways are not our ways--and we can’t be responsible for them.
It’s the first time in the history of Circle he has not done up his man
and he isn’t any too particular how he does it, so watch out he doesn’t
knife you.”
“We’ll be careful all right, from now on, Mr. McQuesten, believe me,”
returned Bill.
“He’s out of his latitude,” put in Jack--that is Jack Heaton; “he ought
to be ashamed of himself living up here on the Arctic Circle with white
people instead of being down there on the Tropic of Cancer with the rest
of the _greasers_.”
“If he pulls any of that _Chilili Mex_ stuff on me to-night I’ll send
him so far he’ll need a weegie board to get back to earth on, but I’m
thankin’ you Mister McQuesten for tellin’ me as how I should be careful,
sir,” Bill said in an apologetic voice, perhaps because he had let Black
Pete off so easily the night before.
“Now to get down to business, Mr. McQuesten,” began Jack who was anxious
to get things a-moving. “What we want is an outfit of clothes, mess-gear
and grub that will carry us through the winter. We’re not going so far
away but what we expect to get back before the _last ice_ and _first
water_ but we might want to keep on going and we must have an outfit so
that we can pull through if needs be.”
“What you want is an outfit for about eight months but you couldn’t
begin to pack it on your backs or haul it on sleds,” the old outfitter
explained; “such an outfit would weigh in the neighborhood of eight
hundred or a thousand pounds, and a man can’t carry more than fifty
pounds or haul more than one hundred pounds on a stretch. What you ought
to have is a couple of dog-sleds.”
“Perzactly!” agreed Bill, “and the question now is can we get the dogs.”
“There are some very likely dogs in and around Circle that I might be
able to pick up for you and I’ll see the men who own them over at the
Palace to-night. I’ll go ahead and outfit you on the strength of your
being able to get the dogs.”
“Good!” ejaculated Jack.
“First of all the things you’ll wear,” the old trader struck out
genially and his eyes twinkled more merrily than ever for here was big
business staring him in the face--a volume of it such as he had not
transacted since the palmy days of Circle these many years agone.
The boys were all attention.
“You’ll want a couple of suits of waterproof underwear, a Mackinaw coat
and breeches for early winter and spring; a caribou skin coat with the
fur on which has a hood fixed to it; a pair of moosehide or bearskin
breeches, a couple of pairs of moccasins and _muk-luks_ apiece and about
a dozen pairs of German sox.”
“Whoa, Buddy,” sang out Bill, “I wouldn’t wear a pair o’ them Boche
socks if I had to go barefoot, see?”
“That’s only the name of them, boy; why they make them down there in
Dawson,” explained Mr. Jack, the storekeeper.
“Well, I might wear ’em in a pinch then,” said Bill.
“Then you must have fur mittens that are lined with wool; several pairs
of woolen mittens to wear when you are building your log cabin, heavy
fur caps and fur lined sleeping bags. Of course there will be towels and
handkerchiefs and all of that sort of small stuff.”
As the storekeeper enumerated the various items of clothing, he brought
them forth and laid out two piles, one for each of the boys.
“Now let me tell you something about taking care of these fur clothes;
if you expect them to last you for more than a month take my advice and
keep them dry, or if they do get wet, don’t wait but stop where you are,
build a fire and dry them then and there. I don’t care how low the
_quick_ falls you can’t get cold in one of these suits.
“Oh, yes; I almost forgot your eye shades but they are absolutely
necessary in traveling over the snow on bright days,” and he produced a
queer looking pair of goggles without any glasses in them. “These are
Esquimo shades and I wouldn’t give a cent for any other kind,” he said
as he handed the boys a pair.
They examined them closely and found that they were made of wood and
where the lenses were supposed to be in a pair of goggles there were
thin pieces of wood instead with a couple of slits in them to let the
light through. Jack and Bill put them on and made puns and had fun over
and out of them. Jack pretended he was a college _prof_ and then gave an
imitation of Teddy Roosevelt. Not to be outdone, Bill gave an imitation
of Jack giving an imitation of him, and then he wound up by pretending
he was Judge Gilhooley of the Harlem Police Court and promptly sentenced
himself to pay a fine of seven dollars and twenty-three cents for
falsely (or badly) impersonating _Hizzoner_.
Jack McQuesten laughed at their antics until his sides ached and the
boys laughed too, and altogether Circle wasn’t such a bad town as they
had painted it.
“You’ll take these eye shades more seriously when you have to use them
and you’ll thank your Uncle Jack for giving them to you, for they leave
no bad after effects as glass goggles do when you take them off.
“Next comes the hardware,” he went on explaining as he had to a
thousand, yes ten thousand, _tenderfeet_, in the past, and he thoroughly
enjoyed living over again those golden days. “I call everything hardware
that you can’t eat, wear, use for medicine, hunt or fish with, except
the dogs.
“You’ll need quite a lot of hardware including snowshoes and sleds, a
wall tent, tarpaulins and compasses, for traveling. For building your
cabin you will want a five-foot crosscut saw, a rip and a hand saw, an
ax, hammer and some other carpenter tools, besides nails, hinges, rivets
and such like traps.
“For cooking a folding sheet-iron stove, pans, coffee pot, tin plates,
cups, knives, forks and spoons. You say you’ve got a good single
barrelled repeating shotgun and a hunting knife apiece? You must take
along plenty of loaded shells and I will fix up all of the fishing
tackle you want. For your prospecting outfit you must take a
prospector’s pick and a miner’s pick with a steel point, a shovel with a
round point such as we use up here, a magnet, a few pounds of
quicksilver, a gold pan, a small gold scale to weigh your winnings on
and a magnifying glass.
“And now for the grub. This will include flour, corn-meal, yeast in
cakes and baking powder; evaporated fruits, potatoes, onions and
vegetables; sugar and saccharin tablets; ham, bacon and salt pork; about
a hundred pounds of Alaska strawberries and hardtack for emergency
rations, also a lot of pemmican for the same purpose; some tea, coffee
and condensed milk, soap and oleomargarine; salt and pepper, and a few
other little things I shall not forget to put in. You have a medicine
case? What have you got in it?” he asked, for Jack McQuesten had taken a
great interest in these two ‘down east’ boys and he intended to see that
they had enough of everything and the right kind of things--that is if
they ever started.
Jack told him it had bottles containing quinine, pepsin, cathartic
pills, calomel and migrain.
“No drug kit is complete up here unless you have arnica for stiff joints
and strained muscles and boracic acid for blistered and aching feet.”
The old trader was in no hurry to get the outfit together that day for
he knew there was going to be a fight to the finish in the evening and
knowing Black Pete better than he cared to and not knowing Bill Adams at
all, he allowed that, like as not, the boys wouldn’t need anything
further unless it was one or two spruce boxes.
“Looks to me as if Mr. Jack is tryin’ to sell us his store and is goin’
off to new diggin’s,” yawped Bill when he looked over the list Jack had
made as the storekeeper called off the items. “An’ what’s the
quicksilver for anyway--to fill up the thermometer tube when the bottom
drops out o’ it?”
Jack laughed at his pal’s little joke. “No, to dissolve out the gold
when we find it in quartz.”
“I suppose we’ll have to take it and pay for it and all them other
prospectin’ tools just to make things look regular, but we’ll throw them
away as soon as we gets outer sight. We’re after gold in sacks, not in
handfuls,” said Bill. “Why man alive it ’ud take a freight car to
transport all the stuff he’s goin’ to sell us; and besides, think o’ the
skads o’ spondulicks we’re goin’ to have to cough up fer it all, too.”
“You must remember that we’ve got to live all winter, Bill, and
McQuesten knows just what he’s about.”
“An’ what’s them Alaska strawberries?--a hundred pounds o’ them!--he
must think we’re goin’ to a Fourth Ward Picnic or a strawberry festible.
Do you know, Jack, I’m goin’ to have some o’ them night-bloomin’
strawberries for supper if I has to tip that slant-eyed, Hong-Kong cook
at the hotel a four bit piece.
“I suppose you’ve eaten _pemmican_, haven’t you Bill?”
“I’ve eaten most everything from _chicken-à-la-King_ with youse at the
Ritz-Carlton to a pair o’ old rubber boots when I was shipwrecked at
sea. It seems to me I’ve heard that word _pemmican_ somewhere afore in
my bright log-book o’ youth, but I can’t say as how I ever sat down to a
_table-de-hoty_ dinner where it was served and that I knew I was
partakin’ of it at the same time. Explain it to me and maybe I’ll
remember it by the way it smells.”
“Pemmican,” began Jack, “is like Irish stew, Hungarian goulash,
chop-suey or _chili-con-carne_ in that there is a general recipe for
making it. But cooks take even more liberties than poets; consequently
no two brands of pemmican are made the same, and, hence, cannot taste,
or smell, alike, but the two things that all of them have in common are
filling and staying qualities for either man or dog.
“Pemmican is usually made of meat ground up and grease added to it when
it is cooked, and some makers put pea-flour and other vegetable
ingredients into it to make it cheap. A pound of it will not fill a cup
and you can eat it every meal without getting tired of it. We used great
lots of it--in fact almost lived on it--when I went on that Arctic
expedition, and we fed it to the dogs too.
“Rear Admiral Peary had his pemmican made to order to get the full food
value out of it; his recipe called for lean beef ground fine, two thirds
part, and this was mixed with beef fat, one third part, to which was
added a little sugar and some raisins. The pemmican for the dogs is made
of cats, dogs, horses or any other kind of meat that is cheap. What this
pemmican is like that we are going to get here I haven’t the faintest
idea, but it doesn’t matter much for we’re not going to use it as a
steady diet.”
“One thing is sure, other prospectors have et it and what they can eat
we can eat if we have to,” was Bill’s idea of it.
On returning to the hotel Bill took Sing Nook, the Chinese cook to one
side, pressed a fifty cent piece into his hand and told him it was his
earnest desire to have some Alaska strawberries for his supper by way of
a little delicacy.
“Velly welly,” returned the celestial dignitary who presided over the
joss-house of pots and pans; “I glivee you pleanty Alaska stlawbellies
flor slupper.” And so that was easily fixed.
When Bill sat down to partake of the rations that evening he waited
patiently for the Alaska strawberries to come under his observation; but
none materialized as far as his acute judgment of the luscious fruit was
concerned. As soon as the meal was over and the diners had dispersed
Bill got Sing into a corner and sang him a song without music, but the
words of which ran something like this:
“I gave you four bits this afternoon to get me a helpin’ o’ Alaska
strawberries. You took my good money but you failed to deliver the
goods. Now what have you got to say for yourself, you Shanghai colored
son of a Pekin pigtail.”
“Allee samee I dlid glivee you Alaska stlawbellies flor slupper. You no
catchee ’em?” Sing asked very much surprised.
“No, I didn’t catchee ’em and if you don’t catchee ’em for me right now
youse ’ell catchee a couple of ’em in the eye, I’m a thinkin’.”
Sing had seen what Bill had done to Black Pete and he had a very
wholesome respect for this boy with the “velly badee facee,” so he
hustled out into the kitchen and was soon back with an enormous bowl of
beans, which he set on the table.
“What’s this?” questioned Bill sharply.
“Alaska stlawbellies, allee samee you havee tonlight for slupper.”
“Holy cat!” cried Bill in an awful voice. “I’ve been stung!”
Sing in the meantime had become very much alarmed over the
misunderstanding but when he heard Bill guffawing in appreciation of the
joke, he joined in heartily. Bill had learned two things; namely, what
Alaskan strawberries are, and that a Chinaman has a sense of humor.
There was a larger gathering of the Northmen in the Grand Palace Hotel
that night than there had been since the last election. They came in
like spooks at a séance, apparently materialized out of thin air, but
unlike the latter, you would have to admit that they looked mighty like
hard and fast, flesh and blood human beings; and further they refuse to
dematerialize until they had seen what they came forth to see.
As was his wont, Rip Stoneback, who had been prospecting for gold in
these parts for the last quarter of a century but whose innumerable
disappointments had not affected his musical talent, was on the
platform, but he was not fiddling. René and his big brown bear were
there too but they were not executing any fancy steps or doing any funny
stunts, for the gathering that night were neither interested in the
goddess of music, nor of the dance, nor, again, of comedy.
What they were there to see was a man’s game that had originated in the
primeval world, had been handed down while man was in the process of
development, and has since bided in communities that are far more
cultured than Circle. It was the old spirit of the fight that called
them and they were there to a man.
The tables, which were always scattered round the hall, where divers and
sundry games with the pasteboards were played of an evening, had all
been set back against the walls and the chairs piled up around them.
Just why Doc Marling had seen fit to move them off the floor was not
apparent unless he thought it was going to be a sprinting match instead
of a pugilistic contest. There was enough room in the hall for a dozen
squared rings.
He had also removed all of the breakable assets to better protected
places, his bump of precaution having been enlarged by the unfortunate
breaking of his three hundred dollar “lookin’-glass” that was the pride
of Circle and the envy of towns up and down the Yukon River for a
hundred miles in either direction.
Conversation was being carried on but it was of a tense kind and low,
and not at all like the big voiced, open hearted talk that is the way of
these free men of the Northland. And all because a seasoned man, but a
bully, was going to do battle with a stripling who hailed from a place
they had heard spoken of as New York.
Bill had seen fights, yes, he had had fights ever since he could
remember and in later years, as a member of the _Harlem Athletic Club_,
he had watched some friendly bouts of give and take and had himself
participated in so many battles that the fact he was going to fight
Black Pete had no more effect on him than if he had been going to spar
with Jack.
Black Pete was in a different mood. He too had had his fights but they
were far between and rough and tumble ones at that with men who, like
himself, knew nothing about the science of the game, and usually he came
out on top. Failing in this he had used his knife on men who downed him,
and once he shot a man. A bully sooner or later, though, will meet his
match and when Black Pete met Bill he was scheduled for a K. O.
(knockout).
At nine o’clock, or thereabouts, the proprietor walked over to the place
where the bout was to be pulled off and made this announcement:
“We have with us to-night Black Pete, champeen all round pugilist of
Alaska and Bill Adams, the New York Kid, in a friendly bout and may the
best man win.”
Black Pete came on to the center of the floor full of dash and dog. Then
Bill came on and held out his hand but Black Pete refused to shake, so
Bill shook hands with himself, just like that. Evidently Pete was not
going to fight according to approved ring rules. Instead he swung a
vicious right hander at Bill’s head. Bill ducked it and laughed and he
knew his man was slow.
Then by sparring and feinting he drew from Pete rights and lefts with
the force of a sledge-hammer back of them but which Bill side-stepped or
ducked. It was not long before Pete showed signs of getting tired of
hitting the air. As Pete had told himself, if he could ever hit Bill he
would smash in his face; the power was back of his blows all right but
the trouble was that Bill wouldn’t stand still long enough to let him do
it.
Bill, who was as lithe and nimble on his feet as a cat, was everywhere
around his opponent at once and kept him on the go following his
tactics. Then Bill must have gotten careless for Black Pete gave him a
wallop on the jaw that sent him whirling a dozen feet. Now for the first
time Pete’s friends egged him on and yelled “give it to him again.”
Then Pete, encouraged by his luck, rushed Bill, but he was not to be
caught napping again. He warmed up to his work and tapped Pete on the
nose, making it bleed, on the jaw, making it hurt, in the mouth, making
it swell and in the eye making it black; in fact he hit him any and
everywhere he wanted to and so fast did he hammer him that Pete got
bewildered and began to strike out in every direction in the hope that
some of his blows would land on his enemy’s anatomy, and so another did.
It was a glancing blow and scraped Bill’s cheek so hard it nearly ripped
the knife scar open.
“Wind him up Bill,” called out Jack.
“All right,” his partner answered, and with that he gave Pete one of his
famous ’ospital punches and he went to the floor in a heap.
Jack went over to Pete and slowly counted ten and as he still failed to
show any signs of intelligence he counted him out. Pete’s friends
carried him over to a corner where he came to a half hour later and then
they put him to bed. He had had “a yard and a half over plenty,” as Bill
would say.
Rip sawed away again on his fiddle, Doc put the tables back on the
floor, René danced and wrestled with his good-natured bear and the men
played cards again, but no one asked Bill or Jack to have a drink, a
cigar or a bullet as long as they were in Circle. I dare say that the
veriest tenderfoot can now go into the Grand Palace Hotel and he will be
treated as considerately as he would in the Waldorf-Astoria, in New
York, the Blackstone in Chicago or the Palace in San Francisco.
The next morning after the bout Black Pete lit out for other diggings
and he has never been seen in Circle since. In this primitive way then
are bad breeds often made into better men.