The day had been clear and cold, but a blanket of cloud formed across
the face of the sky and the night came on warm and dark, with the hint
of snow impending. The thermometer registered fifteen below zero, and
in the Klondike-winter fifteen below is esteemed very warm.
At a few minutes before midnight, leaving Shorty with the dogs five
hundred yards down the creek, Smoke joined the racers on Number Three.
There were forty-five of them waiting the start for the
thousand-thousand dollars Cyrus Johnson had left lying in the frozen
gravel. Each man carried six stakes and a heavy wooden mallet, and was
clad in a smock-like parka of heavy cotton drill.
Lieutenant Pollock, in a big bearskin coat, looked at his watch by the
light of a fire. It lacked a minute of midnight.
"Make ready," he said, as he raised a revolver in his right hand and
watched the second hand tick around.
Forty-five hoods were thrown back from the parkas. Forty-five pairs of
hands unmittened, and forty-five pairs of moccasins pressed tensely
into the packed snow. Also, forty-five stakes were thrust into the
snow, and the same number of mallets lifted in the air.
The shots rang out, and the mallets fell. Cyrus Johnson's right to the
million had expired. To prevent confusion, Lieutenant Pollock had
insisted that the lower centre-stake be driven first, next the
south-eastern; and so on around the four sides, including the upper
centre-stake on the way.
Smoke drove in his stake and was away with the leading dozen. Fires
had been lighted at the corners, and by each fire stood a policeman,
list in hand, checking off the names of the runners. A man was
supposed to call out his name and show his face. There was to be no
staking by proxy while the real racer was off and away down the creek.
At the first corner, beside Smoke's stake, Von Schroeder placed his.
The mallets struck at the same instant. As they hammered, more arrived
from behind and with such impetuosity as to get in one another's way
and cause jostling and shoving. Squirming through the press and
calling his name to the policeman, Smoke saw the Baron, struck in
collision by one of the rushers, hurled clean off his feet into the
snow. But Smoke did not wait. Others were still ahead of him. By the
light of the vanishing fire he was certain that he saw the back, hugely
looming, of Big Olaf, and at the south-western corner Big Olaf and he
drove their stakes side by side.
It was no light work, this preliminary obstacle race. The boundaries
of the claim totalled nearly a mile, and most of it was over the uneven
surface of a snow-covered, niggerhead flat. All about Smoke men
tripped and fell, and several times he pitched forward himself,
jarringly, on hands and knees. Once, Big Olaf fell so immediately in
front of him as to bring him down on top.
The upper centre-stake was driven by the edge of the bank, and down the
bank the racers plunged, across the frozen creek-bed, and up the other
side. Here, as Smoke clambered, a hand gripped his ankle and jerked
him back. In the flickering light of a distant fire, it was impossible
to see who had played the trick. But Arizona Bill, who had been
treated similarly, rose to his feet and drove his fist with a crunch
into the offender's face. Smoke saw and heard as he was scrambling to
his feet, but before he could make another lunge for the bank a fist
dropped him half-stunned into the snow. He staggered up, located the
man, half-swung a hook for his jaw, then remembered Shorty's warning
and refrained. The next moment, struck below the knees by a hurtling
body, he went down again.
It was a foretaste of what would happen when the men reached their
sleds. Men were pouring over the other bank and piling into the jam.
They swarmed up the bank in bunches, and in bunches were dragged back
by their impatient fellows. More blows were struck, curses rose from
the panting chests of those who still had wind to spare, and Smoke,
curiously visioning the face of Joy Gastell, hoped that the mallets
would not be brought into play. Overthrown, trod upon, groping in the
snow for his lost stakes, he at last crawled out of the crush and
attacked the bank farther along. Others were doing this, and it was
his luck to have many men in advance of him in the race for the
northwestern corner.
Down to the fourth corner, he tripped midway and in the long sprawling
fall lost his remaining stake. For five minutes he groped in the
darkness before he found it, and all the time the panting runners were
passing him. From the last corner to the creek he began overtaking men
for whom the mile-run had been too much. In the creek itself Bedlam
had broken loose. A dozen sleds were piled up and overturned, and
nearly a hundred dogs were locked in combat. Among them men struggled,
tearing the tangled animals apart, or beating them apart with clubs.
In the fleeting glimpse he caught of it, Smoke wondered if he had ever
seen a Dore grotesquery to compare.
Leaping down the bank beyond the glutted passage, he gained the
hard-footing of the sled-trail and made better time. Here, in packed
harbours beside the narrow trail, sleds and men waited for runners that
were still behind. From the rear came the whine and rush of dogs, and
Smoke had barely time to leap aside into the deep snow. A sled tore
past, and he made out the man, kneeling and shouting madly. Scarcely
was it by when it stopped with a crash of battle. The excited dogs of
a harboured sled, resenting the passing animals, had got out of hand
and sprung upon them.
Smoke plunged around and by. He could see the green lantern of Von
Schroeder, and, just below it, the red flare that marked his own team.
Two men were guarding Schroeder's dogs, with short clubs interposed
between them and the trail.
"Come on, you Smoke! Come on, you Smoke!" he could hear Shorty calling
anxiously.
"Coming!" he gasped.
By the red flare he could see the snow torn up and trampled, and from
the way his partner breathed he knew a battle had been fought. He
staggered to the sled, and, in a moment he was falling on it, Shorty's
whip snapped as he yelled: "Mush! you devils! Mush!"
The dogs sprang into the breast-bands, and the sled jerked abruptly
ahead. They were big animals--Hanson's prize team of Hudson Bays--and
Smoke had selected them for the first stage, which included the ten
miles of Mono, the heavy-going of the cut-off across the flat at the
mouth, and the first ten miles of the Yukon stretch.
"How many are ahead?" he asked.
"You shut up an' save your wind," Shorty answered. "Hi! you brutes!
Hit her up! Hit her up!"
He was running behind the sled, towing on a short rope. Smoke could
not see him; nor could he see the sled on which he lay at full length.
The fires had been left in the rear, and they were tearing through a
wall of blackness as fast as the dogs could spring into it. This
blackness was almost sticky, so nearly did it take on the seeming of
substance.
Smoke felt the sled heel up on one runner as it rounded an invisible
curve, and from ahead came the snarls of beasts and the oaths of men.
This was known afterward as the Barnes-Slocum Jam. It was the teams of
these two men which first collided, and into it, at full career, piled
Smoke's seven big fighters. Scarcely more than semi-domesticated
wolves, the excitement of that night on Mono Creek had sent every dog
fighting-mad. The Klondike dogs, driven without reins, cannot be
stopped except by voice, so that there was no stopping this glut of
struggle that heaped itself between the narrow rims of the creek. From
behind, sled after sled hurled into the turmoil. Men who had their
teams nearly extricated were overwhelmed by fresh avalanches of
dogs--each animal well-fed, well-rested, and ripe for battle.
"It's knock down an' drag out an' plow through!" Shorty yelled in his
partner's ear. "An' watch out for your knuckles! You drag out an' let
me do the punchin'!"
What happened in the next half hour Smoke never distinctly remembered.
At the end he emerged exhausted, sobbing for breath, his jaw sore from
a first-blow, his shoulder aching from the bruise of a club, the blood
running warmly down one leg from the rip of a dog's fangs, and both
sleeves of his parka torn to shreds. As in a dream, while the battle
still raged behind, he helped Shorty reharness the dogs. One, dying,
they cut from the traces, and in the darkness they felt their way to
the repair of the disrupted harnesses.
"Now you lie down an' get your wind back," Shorty commanded.
And through the darkness the dogs sped, with unabated strength, down
Mono Creek, across the long cut-off, and to the Yukon. Here, at the
junction with the main river-trail, somebody had lighted a fire, and
here Shorty said good bye. By the light of the fire, as the sled
leaped behind the flying dogs, Smoke caught another of the
unforgettable pictures of the North Land. It was of Shorty, swaying
and sinking down limply in the snow, yelling his parting encouragement,
one eye blackened and closed, knuckles bruised and broken, and one arm,
ripped and fang-torn, gushing forth a steady stream of blood.